For Kathy
by nedthejanitor
Summary: Matt Stoneman, driven out as a pariah from his own hometown, seeks redemption in the form of a wish from the seven magic dragon balls. But redemption for him is going to come at the terrible cost of his moral decay, as he must resort to deadlier and deadlier sins to obtain the balls-and fend off challenges from everybody else seeking them. New chapters resuming Saturday the 18th.
1. Prologue

_**Okay, bear with me on this, because it's way different from my usual fare. I'm attempting a fairly serious DBZ fic, so it's fair for me to warn readers of all the other stuff I've written in the past to sort of tender their expectations. Thanks.**_

 _The day I said goodbye to Matt Stoneman, I was standing behind my bar, watching the usual slow trickle of customers arrive one hour after I open at 6 PM. Most of the people I serve at my bar, I wouldn't have anything to do with outside of business. That's not because I don't find them to be interesting people, they are, but they're the kind of interesting you want to watch instead of get caught up in. Tired, middle-aged men working on railroad or construction in the unspeakable heat walk in with a gait like life is always right behind them, screwing them out of every last drop of fluid in their bodies, and mutter the name of their preferred drinks like incantations through faded, chapped lips. Many of these men are hopelessly addicted to my products, pickling their livers and going home after closing to make trouble for their families. It's only at night, when most of these people can barely see, that the more stable regulars come in and something resembling a crowd starts to form._

 _In a small town like this, when you're a bad man, everyone knows it. When you walk out your front door, and a woman and child are walking by, the woman picks up the pace and makes the child follow. When you pick up groceries, the person behind the counter swiping them doesn't even bother to try making polite conversation. And when you walk into a bar, by God, that's when minds get spoken, and spoken quick. When Matt Stoneman walked in, that's what happened._

 _At first, the place fell silent. It was already quiet, but as the door swung itself shut behind Matt, it became downright ghostly. Eyes swiveled to look at him as he hesitantly approached the bar and ordered a cheap shot of whiskey. I don't think he even felt like drinking, because he sipped it instead of shooting it. His face was shrouded in the emotions of a man attending a funeral, and I wondered at the time if it was his own._

 _It wasn't long after he got his drink that a tall, thin man in a cowboy hat named Cliff—one of my daytime regulars—walked over and took a seat next to Matt. He wasted no time. "I want you out of here."_

 _Matt nodded. "I know. Let me finish this drink first."_

 _Cliff paused and looked down at the drink partially enclosed in Matt's hand. "You got one minute."_

" _He has as long as he needs, Cliff." Yeah, that's what I wanted to say, but I didn't. If I have any nobility in me after all these years of slowly poisoning all these people, it doesn't matter as much as my reputation. Anyone around here finding out that I was sympathetic to Mr. Stoneman, the child murderer, would let that news spread like wildfire and all of my business would be gone. Well, besides a handful of people who're too busy being constantly drunk to give a damn about being upright citizens._

 _Instead, I watched wordlessly as Matt turned the shot glass upside down, letting the burning liquid cascade down his throat, then left his money on the counter and walked out. Like a switch had been flipped, conversation resumed, only all of it happened to be about the nerve of that damn shady character._

 _I still don't know why I did what came next, but I think if Matt had tried to keep a normal expression on his face instead of wearing his heart on his sleeve, it might not have happened. I went to the back, where my part-time assistant had just arrived and was putting his coat up in a box next to the backdoor._

" _Nate, go ahead and get started," I told him, "I'm going to take my break early today."_

" _Sure, boss," he said, and nodded._

 _I walked down the street a couple of blocks and found Matt sitting by himself on the curb, where a near-deserted Mexican church loomed just over his back. I leaned against the nearby stop sign and tried to get a look at his face, but his head was resting on his kneecaps. "Look, I—uh… what happened back there, I just…" A sigh runs through my lips. "I apologize for that."_

 _He looked up from his kneecaps to give me a smile that rattled my nerves. "Don't bother."_

" _Why not?" I asked because I had no idea what else to say._

" _You and the rest of those fellas in there don't need to worry about seeing me around anymore. My stuff is already packed. By tomorrow, I'll be miles and miles away."_

 _I felt a little relieved that he wasn't referring to suicide at first. "Do you have any place in mind?"_

" _No, not at all. All I feel like doing is driving."_

" _With what money? How far could you make it? You have to settle somewhere."_

" _Settle," Matt snapped with enough ferocity to startle me. When he resumed talking, his voice had calmed again, but the bitterness remained like storm damage. "Carl, I don't know how long you've been in this town, but I've been living here all my life. Hell, save for this one time a girlfriend and I took a road trip to West City, I've barely even left this place for a vacation. I've watched the same faces and seen the same scenery so much that, as twisted and against me as it's become now, I can't stand to stay. I can't stand it…"_

 _I heard a warble in his voice, and my blood ran cold. That's one thing I can't deal with: crying. As much of it as I've had to see these last several years, I can't deal with it. It's an awful thing to watch, because it's such a hopeless thing to do. When I get sad, I like to take action. Whatever's bothering me, I either talk about it to someone or I go out for a walk until I think it all through. When a person is crying, it's as if they're saying whatever's bothering them is heavier than they can handle._

" _Matt…" I sat down next to him on the curb, noting that I had about twenty minutes until Nate was going to start wondering where the hell I'd went. "What happened was not your fault. Most of the people here were so blinded by their grief and their anger, they couldn't see it, but it was obviously not your fault. The judge and jury agreed."_

" _She just jumped out right in front of me!" snapped Matt, and I instantly realized I'd fucked up, because if he was about to cry before he definitely was starting now. "I was just trying to get back to the house, I went down that road every time I got groceries for over ten years! She was always playing out in the front yard, just her and a little ball. Out in the middle of nowhere, I don't know why she didn't have any friends with her if she was so goddamn popular!"_

" _It's okay, Matt, I know the story—"_

" _I DIDN'T ACCELERATE!" he screamed. "I DIDN'T—"_

" _MATT!" I hollered as loud as I possibly could, thinking I was going to have to do a lot more of it to try and calm him down. But it was like I reset him or something when I yelled his name, because he looked at me as if he didn't even know I was there. But then he said, "I still remember her face against my windshield, Carl. I see it every time I close my fucking eyes, man. She… her teeth were sticking out between the cracks in the glass, I… I saw skin peeling—"_

" _Matt, you've got to stop thinking about that—"_

" _I know," he said shakily. "But it won't go away. Sometimes I'll be watching something on TV and I'll see a person's face, and look at their eyes… her cold, black eyes will come over theirs. I won't even be trying to think about what happened, but it just does."_

 _Before thinking about the next words coming out of my mouth, I said them. "Have you thought about talking to a therapist?" There are no therapists in this town. Matt looked at me like I was out of my mind, and I was wondering if I was. "There ain't any here, that's why your place does so well."_

 _I took a lot of offense to that, but didn't say anything because I figured it was probably true and the last thing I wanted to risk doing was to set Matt off again. "Is there anything I can say to convince you to try and stay here?"_

 _Matt didn't respond. Instead he fished something out of his jacket pocket. It was some kind of green-faced compass with a yellow grid and a button on the top. He pushed the button, and a yellow orb lit up on the screen, with a triangle next to it displaying the number 1. "I found this thing while taking a walk on the outskirts of town the other day. You have any idea what it is?"_

" _Not a clue. Looks to me like a compass or radar. Maybe a kid's toy, I don't know."_

 _He shrugged and stared at the face of the device. "I thought, for fun, I might follow this thing."_

 _I laughed a little, in spite of myself. Matt's face cooled a bit. "That's your plan? Matt, you're going to be gone for a couple of days, tops, then you'll have to come back! You'll have no choice."_

" _You're wrong about that last part," he said. "I have a choice and I've already made it. I can't even walk into a bar and enjoy a drink without someone making me leave the place because they can't even stand to be in the same room with me, much less talk. All my friends have turned their backs, my family all lives out of town. There's nothing for me here, Carl."_

" _I don't believe that. But even if that's true, man, just move one town over. Maybe two. They aren't going to know much about what you did, and they probably won't care either. You can just start over. This idea you seem to have about turning into a homeless drifter is weird, and it's going to bring you nothing but pain."_

" _How do you know and why do you care?"_

" _I know because I've seen it. I get drifters every now and again. I know they're drifters because I'll ask them if they're from around here and they'll tell me they're from some place way the hell out of the way, sometimes places I've never even heard of. Obviously, since no one would come here for a vacation, they're always passing through. Most of the time, they'll be absolutely filthy, and their skin will be some kind of a dark color that they clearly weren't born with. They'll be… the most miserable sons-of-bitches you ever saw in your life. Sitting on a stool in some town they never heard of and don't plan to come back to, nursing a drink they can't have too many of because they don't want to get drunk and pass out so someone steals all their shit off their back… a drifter's life, by definition, is solitary. It's lonely. If you take it on, especially on a whim like this, you'll either die out there or your soul is going to wither away."_

 _He didn't say anything for a good while, just rested his chin between his kneecaps. "You didn't answer the other half of my question."_

 _It was my turn to be silent for a long time. I watched Matt's eyes gently close, like he got exactly the reaction he expected. So I tried to subvert it. "I care because no one should live like that."_

" _As opposed to living like I am now? I can't even walk over to the neighbor's house and ask to borrow a goddamn cup of flour without her refusing to answer the door. I hear whispers no matter where I go. I'm starting to hear them even when I'm by myself. There's worse kinds of loneliness than just being by yourself; the worst kind is being in a room full of people who wish you weren't there. That's loneliness, Carl."_

 _That's when I noticed it was starting to get a little dark outside. It was about a month before Christmas, and I was just beginning to get acclimated to the whole nightfall being early business. I had gotten a little tired of arguing with Matt, especially when he was right—I shouldn't have cared as much as I did, but I did. I think it was because I knew how he was before the whole mess with Kathy, the girl he ran over. He was never the most sociable guy, he kept to himself a lot and didn't seem to be too close to people, but he was polite and pleasant. No one hated him at all, which is why it amazed me when people turned on him so viciously over what seemed to me like a simple accident._

" _I have to head on back to the bar. Listen, if you decide not to go through with this—just driving off to the middle of nowhere because a toy said you should—come over to the bar after closing time. We'll play a game of darts or something. Just…"_

" _Don't let anyone see me come in, right?" Matt said._

" _N—" I was about to deny it. I really wanted to. But I couldn't.  
_

_I never saw Matt again after I left. I didn't think I would, even as I waited a couple hours for him in the cold, dim bar, listening to the way my darts thudded against the board, the sound filling the emptiness the customers left. If Matt had shown up, he would have been the first person I ever let come into my place outside of closing time. If I had any close family that lived around here, I could see inviting them. I haven't even had a girlfriend for about two years, after my last relationship got ruined because of my line of work._

 _To this day, I'm not sure what makes me think so much about that man. I've seen a lot of strangers come and go in my life, and I could tell a person stories that would make the hairs on their toes curl up like weeds in a burning heat, but he sticks out to me. Matt Stoneman, the whisper-thin 30-something year old man with a high-pitched, lisping voice. I couldn't believe he could possibly make it out there. I still don't, but it makes me think._

 _What kind of guts, or desperation, or sense of adventure does a man need before they'll abandon all that they've ever known to walk naked into the world and let it sniff them until it either kills them or decides they aren't a threat? It's bizarre to imagine, but I think it could happen to anybody. There are other ways to kill yourself besides just using a bullet or a rope. Sometimes, killing yourself is about living the life you always wanted to live so you could die feeling like you didn't miss anything. Maybe that's what Matt's going for. But then again, I don't know. It's all just speculation, isn't it?_

 _It's been about six months now and the town has since completely forgotten about Matt Stoneman. I shouldn't say that—they haven't forgotten, they've tried to, like a person brainwashing themselves. The death of Kathy Barnes and the ensuing trial where Matt was easily found not guilty of manslaughter was easily the most talked-about and most harrowing thing I think anyone here has ever had the chance to witness first-hand. I think it's a little different when you're in the same town with something like that, even if you had nothing to do with either the victim or the perpetrator. It's about the protection a person gets from being surrounded by their home soil, and when a substance as simultaneously foreign and familiar as the spilled blood of another member of town splatters and taints it, it's… violating. It's invasive._

 _When Matt left, he took his only house key with him, so as far as I can tell the place is still his. That hasn't stopped people from scribbling all kinds of terrible graffiti all over it. "Monster," "murderer," other imaginative stuff like that. I've got to wonder how many of my patrons are responsible for that shit. I always thought that graffiti was the territory of kids, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that we never grow out of the things we used to do when we were children. What really happens is, all of those childhood habits dissipate in our heads the way a pill will dissolve on your tongue or in your stomach, where it will proceed to permeate all of our experiences as adults. In other words, I think we are drugged by our own childhoods, or diseased by them, and when the going gets tough we allow those old habits to take up too much of our bloodstream._

 _One last thing: I feel like Matt would've come back if not for that device he found. When he was being cast out in the wake of the Kathy trial, he probably felt like his life had lost all purpose. But he got something back from God or luck or whatever, because when he found that device… what I saw in his eyes…_


	2. Violet

Matt Stoneman was two miles away from East City when his car limped to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, gas meter's needle long past red. For the past fifty miles, he'd really thought he could make it.

"For God's sake," he whined, head-butting his steering wheel gently. East City was visible in the distance and he had 100 bucks from doing odd jobs in a one-horse town called Slauson. A cheap hotel, a loaf of bread and a quarter of a tank was all that was in his future unless he found some help somewhere. As long as he didn't have to rattle a coffee cup ever again, he'd be satisfied.

One month had passed since he'd left his hometown of Gasket, where his reputation had been ruined. The death of Kathy three months ago hadn't ceased haunting him. Her shattered face in the windshield appeared in front of him every time he closed his eyes while driving. His main goal in leaving that town hadn't been to get away from the hatred of the townspeople, as he had told that bartender the day he left. No, what drove him away was the memory, the emptiness of the town without Kathy. It was like the soul had been torn out of the place, leaving a dry, empty husk full of lost people, and he wasn't willing to stay and be one of them. He had only one life. He had to keep living it.

There was no gas can in the trunk of his car, so subtracting the cost of one from his budget, he realized it would be more like an eighth of a tank. Still more than enough to get him to town, but after that, not much of anywhere else. East City would have to be his home for a little while.

"Not bad," he said to himself with a sad smile. If this place fit his idea of what a city's like, navigating it would be hell on earth, and cost a lot of precious gas.

The road around him was barren and light brown, devoid of promise and, in combination with the wind, more than ready to pour mounds of dirt into the open wounds of weary travelers. Somewhere far off to the north, a mountain was transparent but visible far in the distance. As he walked, Matt would fantasize about detouring to it, finding a little enclave with fresh water and vegetation and just living there for the rest of his life, not being anywhere near anything that looked like a lonely country road ever again. 

"Hey, look over at that guy.

The balding, reed-thin man behind the counter at the corner convenience store not far from East City looked up and through the glass door, where a dirty man in ratty and wrinkled clothes was walking up. The thin man's eyes darted toward where he keeps his shotgun, making sure it was there and within arm's reach before the suspicious man came to the counter.

"Do you sell gas cans here?" he asked. "Need one to get gas to my car, it's out there on the highway."

"How far out?"

"I've been walking for 45 minutes, I think. You have the time?"

"Yeah. 4:30."

"Oh, then 30 minutes."

"Really?" The man put down his paper and stood to attention at the cash register. "It sounds like you're a pretty long way out. You might be getting towed, this county tends to do that with cars they think are abandoned. Hey, you listenin'?"

"Uh—oh, yeah," said Matt with a smile that was pure instinct. "Yeah, I was just looking at your newspapers."

"Oh, the story about the old Red Ribbon Army headquarters caught your eye?"

"Yeah…" said Matt. He felt slightly embarrassed that he had another one of his drift-offs in the middle of a conversation, but at least he had something to blame it on. He didn't know what the Red Ribbon army was. "Do you have the gas can or…?"

"We don't sell 'em," said the thin man. "But I'll tell you what, when Joe gets back from break, I'll get him to lend you his. He can give you a ride out to your car, too."

Matt took out his wallet. "I'd sure appreciate it. I'll throw him a ten for that."

"He'll do it for free, man. Don't worry about it."

"No, I mean—"

"We aren't taking your money. Look, we get almost no customers around here, our place looks too shitty. You paying for the gas is enough. Besides, I wouldn't feel right about letting you go walking out two or three miles back to your car in this heat. Joe'll be back in about ten minutes, so just relax, have a drink or something. 'Course, you'll have to pay for it."

He let out a little chuckle before sitting back down, picking his newspaper up and unfurling it. Matt nodded and turned to survey the gas station interior. It looked like hell, for the most part. Everything looked about ten years older than the stuff at other gas stations, it was dimly lit, and the floor was crunchy underneath Matt's open-toed shoes. At the back of the station were a couple of fridges full of sodas. The sight of them made Matt's mouth water. He used to chug sodas every day, until he became a road man. Water was a lot more efficient for his lifestyle, but it was always piss-warm and slightly bitter.

"You know," the man behind the counter said, clearing his throat, "I remember back when the Red Ribbon Army fell. I was only a little boy at the time, but I knew how scared everyone was of those people. They were like the thugs of a fascist regime, and people talked about them like they were just invincible. And then…"

He seemed to be waiting for Matt to ask "what," but when he didn't, he went on. "They just fell out of nowhere. The whole main compound was penetrated and destroyed by an outside force of some kind. I can't really say I know for sure what it was, and I don't think anyone else can either. Strangest thing…"

This time, Matt was listening, he just didn't care. His next bed and warm meal were the only things on his mind. "You know any place that's hiring?"

"No. Hell, if I did, I might just abandon this place and go check it out myself. What you need to do is go down 4th street, that whole street is lousy with bars and diners and shit. Of course, and don't take this the wrong way, you really need to clean up."

Matt sighed. "I know. Not exactly easy to do when all the water you find, you need for drinking."

"I know how it is, trust me. Hard times are not good times. I'm sure there's some kind of work you can do in this city. It's a big place."

The conversation stalled until Joe got back. Another thin and sallow man, he gave Matt his gas can and a ride back to his car. 

That night, Matt found himself at a bar. He didn't have a place to sleep or a job, but he had a fizzy soda in his hand, and that was fine for the night. The last thing he needed was to get himself drunk in the middle of the city when he was homeless. Not a way to get good first impressions, especially since his clothes and hair were already a complete wreck.

Across from him was a girl with curly purple hair. He caught her staring at him every time he looked in her direction. The last few times, she didn't even bother to look away. It did little more than arouse a very slight curiosity—the last thing he was really interested in was a one-nighter with a woman he met in a bar when all he wanted was a soda.

But then he got to thinking. She probably had a warm bed. A shower. Maybe she could even help him with clothes somehow. If he could just get ahold of those things for one night, maybe there was a chance of turning a bad situation around. And hell if she didn't seem interested in him. What other reason could there be for her just staring at him that way?

He got up from his stool, and a pang of such sharp nervousness hit him that, at first, he mistook for some kind of nauseous attack. Then he remembered how long it had really been since he'd bedded a woman. It was like saddling a horse after ten years of not even seeing one in person. Well, for him, it hadn't been that long quite yet, but after a certain point it failed to matter.

When Matt tried to take another step forward, his leg wouldn't cooperate with him. Instead, it backed him down and he ended up at the same stool he started from.

"Damn it," he moaned beneath his breath. He'd never been scared of a woman before, but he'd never met one in his life who appeared to be so forward either. Women in his town liked to mill around the local shops and attend church every Sunday. Very few of them attended bars, and fewer still went to them alone. Those that did were usually undesirable alcoholics who carried more baggage than sleeping with them was worth.

He looked over and his heart froze. He was just in time to see her rise from her seat, eyes still fixated on him. Well, at least she was doing the work for him.

"What's your name?" she asked in an authoritative tone he wasn't at all expecting.

"Uh, my name's Matt," he said. "Yours?"

"Violet. Wanna take a walk?"

He tried to shrug casually, but one of his shoulders trembled a little. "Yeah, sure. Why not?"

She didn't respond to his nervousness, but instead went straight for the door, not looking back to confirm that he was following her. They walked across the parking lot in silence, then stopped at a blue sports car the make of which Matt had never seen before.

"I want to talk for a second," Violet said. "That okay? I probably won't keep you very long."

"Yeah. Uh, fine. I guess." Matt was becoming slightly worried that he'd made some kind of terrible mistake. Was he being robbed? It's not like there was anything on him worth robbing. He felt around his jacket pockets. Nope, just a little bit of change and the… weird compass thing. What would she need with that?

A muffled voice. "You comin' in?" Matt came back to reality and got in the passenger seat.

"I'm going to get straight to the point," said Violet in that same almost militant voice from inside the bar, "who gave you that Dragon Radar?"

"What?" Matt said. "Dragon Radar?"

"Don't play dumb, okay? I saw that radar-shaped bump in your jacket before you even sat down. Who did you get it from?"

"I… found it." Matt wished that his explanation didn't sound so much like a lie, because he knew this woman, whoever she was, wouldn't believe him.

"Found it? Where?"

"In a field." Almost true; he found it in the cemetery. "I don't understand why you're asking me these things."

Violet didn't say anything for a moment. Matt tried to read her face in the darkness, but couldn't, and he got the sense he would have failed even if he could see her perfectly. "You really have no idea what you're carrying, do you?"

Matt relaxed a little. "No. It's just something I've been holding on to. I guess I've been traveling the direction it denotes because I don't know where else to go right now."

"You're a drifter, I know," she said. "It's obvious. I've lived here ever since the fall of the Red Ribbon Army."

"Who are the Red Ribbon Army?" Matt asked, leaning in a little in spite of himself. "I heard that name this morning at a gas station. What is that?"

"Was, actually," Violet said. "The Red Ribbon Army was a group of militarily-trained criminals brought together by a man named Red for the sole purpose of collection the Dragon Balls. They almost got them all, too, but ended up being completely decimated by a lone fighter."

"Wait, how big was the group?"

"Well, let's just say big enough to overpower entire small cities and take all of their food, water, and other resources. We—they—were pretty powerful."

Matt scooted away from Violet, pressing his cheek against the window of the passenger side. "You—I heard you say 'we.' You were in that group, weren't you?"

Another long pause, then a deep breath. "Yes. I was a member of the Red Ribbon Army, but I survived because I looted the place and left while that that kid was killing everybody."

"Wait a minute? Kid?" Matt had to stop himself from laughing, which he really didn't want to do in front of this woman who might very easily kill him. "Your army was taken down by one kid? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"You don't have to believe me, I don't really care," said Violet. "All I'm here to tell you: get rid of that fucking Radar immediately."

"Why?" asked Matt, now sure Violet was out of her mind, but not willing to cross her in her own car. "And what are the dragon balls? Am I supposed to take that at face value?"

"Not exactly, no. Look, hand me that radar. If you give me that radar, and promise me you won't go on some suicide mission to gather the dragon balls, I'll tell you my story. I'll tell you what the Red Ribbon Army was like."

"Look lady, I just want to go home, or find a home, or whatever, okay?" Matt said, raising his hands for emphasis. "I just want to get by. Whatever this is really about, I—"

Matt's words tapered off as Violet placed a hand on his shoulder and leaned in, giving him a clear view of her big eyes for the first time. "You can trust me. If I wanted to hurt you, I could have done it already. You need to understand what you're carrying with you, and how it could kill you."

He averted her gaze and stared out the windshield. The part of the city he was in remained ablaze with red light well into the first hours of morning. He thought about how gentle her hand felt on his shoulder. "Fine. I don't have anything you could steal from me besides this—what you call it—Dragon Radar. So do what you're going to do."

Her hand left his shoulder and draped itself across the top of her steering wheel. Her face turned to look straight ahead, and Matt saw a smile teasing the visible edge of her lips. "Okay. I won't have to keep you very long." 

"Any wish I want?" Matt said between sips of fresh coffee. "That's what you believe these things can do?"

"Not believe, know." Violet responded. "Do you remember the world-wide darkening of the sky that happened right before King Piccolo tried to take over?"

"Well, yeah, sure," said Matt. "It was one of the freakiest things I've ever seen. Was it because of these 'dragon balls?'"

"Yes," Violet said. "I was close enough to actually see the dragon. It was incredible, just this enormous snake-like creature with big, red eyes. As far away from the dragon as I actually was, I could see it so vividly, and I've never forgotten it, four years later."

"And why should I believe that?" Matt asked. "You could have just been hallucinating. Everyone was scared during the blackout."

"No way," said Violet. "I knew it was the dragon, I could hear it plain as day. Then, after King Piccolo got his wish—I couldn't hear what it was—the dragon just… exploded. I have no idea if it was supposed to happen… or if King Piccolo did it."

"And you think this is how King Piccolo got his power?"

"Maybe, but it doesn't…" Violet trailed off, her face bent with confusion. "It doesn't explain the kid. The one who destroyed the Red Ribbon Army."

Matt said nothing until Violet continued. "After the headquarters fell, I made it here, with a ton of loot I raided from the place while it was being destroyed. I barely made it out of there as myself."

"What do you mean?"

"That army… changed people. I can't explain it any other way. It made them bad people. Most of the people who enrolled in the army were criminals, sure. I was in a group of professional thieves when I got in. But after a while, they lost…"

Violet paused again. Her mouth hung open like she wanted to say something, but had no words for it. "They lost themselves. They turned into monsters, without hearts. It was because of the dragon balls. I think they're cursed somehow."

"Violet, if this is all true… and I could get anything I want…" Matt said. "I'm going after them. If for no other reason than to be doing something with myself, I'm going after them."

"You're—what?!" Violet stood from her recliner. "Just to be doing something? You have no idea what you're getting yourself into! There are people right now, hundreds of people, who would kill you without blinking just to have that radar, if they knew what it did!"

"They won't know that," said Matt. "I won't tell them. I don't even know if I believe in it, still, but if it's true..."

"Listen," said Violet, "I don't know what it is you're after, if it's money, if it's youth, power—whatever it is, you won't be you by the time you make your wish! You can't be you. Gathering those things—dealing with all the other people who want them—makes you do terrible things. Matt… we had torture chambers in the Red Ribbon headquarters. We had soldiers executed in front of a firing squad for failing once. I watched them burn the body of the most powerful General of the army—who FOUND a Dragon Radar, like you—because he didn't bring the dragon balls too. If you go after those things…"

Matt listened patiently, nodding along, until she stopped. Then he finished his drink and sat the glass down gently next to hers, empty as well. "And what makes you think I haven't done something terrible?" Matt asked. "I killed a little girl."

Violet's face froze. Her hand twitched, fingers brushing along a bulge in her pants pocket.

"I ran over her by accident. I promise you that. If I can believe you about the dragon balls, I need you to trust me on this. Okay?"

"…Okay."

"Okay," he repeated. "If I go after the dragon balls, I'm not doing it to wish anything for me. This is my chance to right the thing I did wrong. I can go back home with Kathy… and I can show them all that I'm not a monster, like they think I am."

"You think turning up with a dead little girl in your arms is going to make them accept you?"

"They won't accept me anyway, Violet."

She was struck by the way he said her name, like someone pleading. In her other pants pocket was the Dragon Radar. She didn't take her eyes off of his as she pulled the radar out, then gently placed it in his outstretched hand. "I've told you everything you need to know about what you're getting yourself into," she said, "so I shouldn't have to ask this, but I can't help myself: do you have any idea… any at all… what you're getting yourself into?"

Matt pulled his hand away and opened his mouth to say yes, but instead his head shook.

"Thank you for being honest," said Violet. "Do you at least want another drink before you leave?"

"I'd better not," said Matt. "I have to get back to my car. Thank you."

"Don't mention it."


	3. Wasp

Two boys ran out of Mrs. Grayson's fifth-grade history classroom in Room 3, one of them screaming. "It bit me! Oww!" the boy repeated over and over, until the other one got fed up and shouted, "It didn't bite you, it stung, you moron!"

The screaming one started to cry, which made the other boy jolt back, scared a little. He started to tug on the crying boy's sleeve. "The teacher said we have to go to the nurse! Come on! We're gonna get in trouble if she comes out here!"

He turned to see the janitor walk over, wheeling a mop and bucket in his wake. "Another wasp?" he asked. The stung boy's pathetic sniff was all the answer he needed.

"Let me handle it when the class lets out," he said with a strained smile, as if he was in pain. Then he looked over at his shoulder at the spill he'd been cleaning up in the middle of the hallway. "Any of you boys know who might've spilled a soda in the hallway and didn't try to clean it up?"

The boys both shook their heads.

"'Kay." The janitor walked away. He heard one of the kids say to the other, he couldn't tell which one it was because their voice was too low: "That guy's so creepy."

After the class, there was no one in the room except Mrs. Grayson. She was relieved about that; the new janitor wasn't very good at all with kids. He was pleasant enough, but something was strange about him and children, which made her question, as a whole, her school's hiring policies. Couldn't they tell right away this was the kind of guy who couldn't hold his own against a bunch of grade-schoolers?

When the janitor came in, Mrs. Grayson gave a smile. "Come in, Mr… I'm so sorry, what was—"

"Mr. Stoneman," he said. "Matt."

"Mr. Stoneman," she repeated. "I'm very sorry to make you do this, but I'm just terrified of wasps. He's still minding his own business on the pencil sharpener right there."

She pointed out the sharpener right next to the door Matt walked in. His blood ran a little cold. "How long has it been sitting here?"

"Ever since it stung that boy," she said. "I'm allergic, so I didn't want to touch it, and the children were too afraid of it. It really disrupted the class, I couldn't concentrate on teaching because we were all so freaked out." She let out a small laugh, and Matt forced one out as well. Mrs. Grayson was a rail-thin woman of nearly 40, and the only person in the whole school Matt felt he could talk to comfortably. In a way, she reminded him of a nice aunt.

"Do you have a textbook or something?" Matt asked.

"Oh! Of course, right here," she opened the drawer of her desk. "Don't worry about getting it dirty, I've got thirty more littering up my house."

The book felt heavy in Matt's hands. "You don't mind if I just whack this thing as hard as I can?"

Something in Mrs. Grayson's eyes changed a little bit, and Matt didn't like it, whatever it was. "Whack it as hard as you can."

He tried to give her a wry smile, but felt sure that it was more like a nauseated grimace, because her face immediately went back to neutral. He refocused his eyes on the benign wasp wasting its time on top of the pencil sharpener, seemingly waiting for someone to come along and take a shot at it. Matt was there to take up the mantle; he swung as hard as he could after a long period of raising the book above his head. The wasp evaded at the last second and launched at Matt's left shoulder. A stabbing pain radiated through his shoulder and down his arm, and he yelped, grabbing at the source of the pain until he had it brushed off.

"Oh, my God, Mr. Stoneman!" Mrs. Grayson squealed. "I-I'm so sorry, here—"

The wasp landed on the chalkboard, and it became all Matt could see. Everything outside of it blurred into a mass gray. He charged at it, book in both of his outstretched hands, and smashed it. Mrs. Grayson yelped like a hurt animal. Matt turned the book around, and saw the reward for his efforts smashed into several small bits, covering a bit of the back text. "I got it," said Matt. Mrs. Grayson nodded. "Great. Um, well, that was all I needed from you, I guess. I don't want to keep you."

"You don't," said Matt. "I know. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Yeah. Yeah, okay."

He left the room just in time to see a little boy with a burr-cut with his shorts down, pissing in his mop bucket. Matt's hand that was still gripping the book tightened and he felt his eyes drying because he couldn't blink for staring at the boy.

When the child was done, he looked into the bucket and doubled over with laughter. Matt wondered where the red light was coming from. His eyes were bloodshot. The mantra, "enough money in my account," looped inside his head. His steps were slow, planned, deliberate. The little boy couldn't hear them.

By the time the little boy turned around and gasped at Matt's frame looming over him, he had the book in both hands, lifted up over his head. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Matt kept waiting for the scene to cut away. When his arms got ready to slam the book down—right on the dead center of the little boy's crying head—the boy ran away. Matt's arms may not have been locked, but his legs were. He sighed and lowered his arms.

"Mr. Stoneman!"

Matt was frightened into dropping the book. Mrs. Grayson was who he found standing right behind him. "I saw the whole thing," the older woman said. "I'll be talking to the principal and superintendent about this. I'm very disappointed in you, Mr. Stoneman."

Matt kicked the book over to Mrs. Grayson's feet. "I'm disappointed, too, ma'am. Don't worry about going to the principal; I quit."

Joe finally heard the bell above the door ring at almost 6 PM. "You're way late, Matt," he said. "We have a shipment of drinks in the back that needs stocking."

"I'm sorry, Joe," said Matt.

"Don't be sorry, just do your job, Matt."

"I was late because—"

"I don't care why you were late, man." His eyes never left the magazine he was reading.

"You'd better. I'm leaving today."

Joe finally looked over at Matt. "What?"

"I have to leave today, Joe. I quit my job."

"Well, goddamn, Matt, I would have liked to hear about that a few days ago!" Joe stood up and bent over the counter slightly. "Hell, I've gotta put out fliers for a new stock clerk!"

"I didn't have a plan, Joe. I got in trouble, so instead of letting them fire me, I quit. I have plenty of money in the bank to do what I need to do. I just came in to say goodbye."

Joe sighed and extended his hand. "Well, shit, I've enjoyed working with you this last few weeks, I just wish the terms were better."

"So do I," said Matt. "Listen, I'll get the sodas if you—"

"No. If you're not leaving your car out back anymore, there's not much point in making you work. I mean, you're on paper as working for us, but you're giving us most of your money. It's pretty illegal, our arrangement."

Matt nodded. "If that's what you want. I guess this is it then?"

"This is it."

The inside of Matt's car was like a small apartment. In the backseat was a bed with a single pillow and a thin blanket. Every morning, Matt woke up with aches in his knees because he had to bend his legs in order to fit in the car. In the passenger seat, he had an ice cooler. Every morning, he would fill it with new ice from out of the store and stock it with lunch meats and bagged loaves of bread. He was sick enough of ham and turkey sandwiches, the thought of them made him feel sick, yet he couldn't concentrate long enough to think about anything else but the dragon balls.

He dreamt about them every night, almost without fail. A great, terrible dragon lurching its snake body down to look at him, red eyes. A sky full of black. In his dream, Kathy would appear in front of him after he spoke a wish he couldn't hear himself saying. She wouldn't be whole, and every dream would be a little different. Her leg would be missing sometimes, and she'd stand lopsided, looking at him with horror bending her face into inhuman shapes. Other times, her arms would be missing. One time, it was her face. A bare, laughing skull stared through baleful sockets into him, not at him, into him. That was the easiest one.

The car started perfectly when he turned the key. He had a lot of work done on it in the last week. It was worth being completely honest with himself now that he was gone and it was behind him—even if he hadn't quit today, he would have done it sometime in the next week. The job was unbearable, and sleeping in his car day after day in the same old place was more than he could take. He looked again at his Dragon Radar. He wasn't too far away from the nearest dragon ball. He could get to it by tomorrow morning.

 _The next morning_

Matt leaned against the side of his car, kicking rocks. The water was only ten feet from the nose of his car. In the distance, he could see a small island. The ball, if Matt's calculations were correct, was right there on that plot of dirt in the middle of the ocean.

"The goddamn ferry," Matt whispered. Not too far down the coast from where he was, two men were talking. One of them was a stout man wearing a yellow hard hat, for reasons Matt didn't even care enough to think about. The other was tall and had a low, growling voice, and he was the one Matt spent the last ten minutes trying to convince to let him across the water. He offered him half of all the zenie he had, which Matt was still in a lot of pain about giving up. All of the food, water, shelter, everything else that could buy him, floated in his mind, topping it like a halo. The two men became audible, and Matt noticed that the shorter one was angry.

With a fake casualness, Matt pushed himself from the car and made slow, wandering steps toward the conversing ferrymen.

"Fine," said the shorter one, "you go ahead and get him over to the island, but this is the last time! Don't ever ask me if you can open the ferry before opening hours again!"

The shorter one stomped past the tall one, and the tall one noticed Matt walking over. "Hey, listen, I can get you over to the island, but this is the only time we're gonna let you early, you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Got my money?"

"In the trunk, sir."

The island was much more green and beautiful from the inside than it was when Matt looked at it off the shore of the mainland. It was entirely flat, with barely any hills that went up to Matt's knee, and in the distance Matt saw a group of what appeared to be mud huts and tee-pees, or some other kind of tents.

Matt looked down at his radar, and his fear was confirmed. The ball was right dead-center in the middle of where the village was. Someone already had it.

"Why didn't I think of that?!" Matt yelled to a sky that only mimicked him in response. There was no point in all the time he was readying himself for this search where he seriously entertained the thought of somebody already having a dragon ball. He took a deep breath, and various unfamiliar smells came to his attention. They were at once sweet and bitter. Around him, a thin smattering of dead-looking trees bent toward and away from him.

He didn't come all this way for nothing. Maybe he could barter. He left his car on the shore and started to walk to the village.

Two men of vastly different ages sat on the ground outside of a modestly-sized straw hut.

"Hot," said the old man before and after smacking his lips loudly.

"When you think it's going to cool down?"

"Probably never."

The young man screwed his face up a little. "So, why are we sitting out here, then?"

"Too hard to breathe inside. Real small, humid."

The young man hung his head down, staring at the space between his legs. Down there, he could see an ant crawling along dutifully through a veritable dark valley of little more than dirt.

"Hey," the old man said. "Hey, Simone. Look up."

Simone raised his head and squinted as much as he could without losing sight entirely.

"You ever see that man before?"

"No," said Simone. "Never seen a man looked like that before, Chief."

"Neither have I. He's headed right for us. This might be your chance to try out some of the tricks you learned in your martial arts class."

Simone stood.

"Hey," Matt said when he was close enough to the two burnt-orange men. One of them had stood up, and was looking at him with a lot of darkness in his eyes.

"What?" Simone asked. "What is it you want from us?"

Matt's demeanor changed. These people seemed to already know what he wanted. "You have something here called a dragon ball. I want it. I will trade you for it."

"Oh? What, like heap bead?" Simone snapped. "We don't have what you're looking for here."

"Simone, does he come in peace?" The ancient man still sat on the ground asked. "Did you ask?"

"Yes," said Matt, being a little facetious. "I come in peace."

The old man sighed and went through the arduous process of lifting himself into a standing position. Simone appeared eager to help, but Matt deduced that this old man was the type who would slap the kid's hands away. "I'm the head of this village," the old man said, bowing slightly. "People around here call me Elder. This is Simone."

"Matt." He held out his hand to shake and the two orange men stared at it with trepidation, before Simone grabbed it and offered a limp shake.

"Now you're here to find a… dragon ball, was it?" asked Elder. "I have to be perfectly honest with you, that sounds barbaric."

At first, Matt couldn't understand what Elder was saying. When it clicked, he choked back a laugh. "No, it's nothing like that. It's… well, from what I've heard—I've never seen one—it's a little orange ball with stars on it."

"Sounds like some kind of keepsake," said Simone. "What makes you think we'd have it, stranger?"

"His name isn't 'stranger,' Simone, it's Matt," Elder said. "I'd appreciate it if you treated this guest of ours with some respect. We don't get travelers often, you know."

"That's the point, Elder," Simone said, "I thought we wanted to stay separate from the ways of outsiders, now we welcome them like family?"

"Simone!"

Matt heard a woman's voice, and thought that it came from the mouth of Elder, a mistake that deeply confused him until a woman walked out of the hut behind Simone and Elder. "Simone, don't talk back to my father!"

Simone cleared his throat, and Matt thought he saw a red hue visible on Simone's cheeks. "Sorry, Seina. You're right."

"Don't apologize to me, Simone."

"Right. Sorry, Elder. Actually—sorry, but I need to go tend the garden now. Excuse me."

"But I already tended the—" Seina started to call after him, but Simone had already taken off. "…garden."

"Right, um…" Matt shifted from one foot to the other, scratching the back of his head. "If I'm being a nuisance here, I'm sorry, but—"

"No trouble at all," said Elder. Matt saw Seina nod along to everything he said as she stood behind him with her arms folded under her chest. "Simone's just wary. He'll get used to you."

"I wasn't planning on staying around very long, sir," said Matt. "I'm collecting seven of these dragon balls I told you about, and I just want the one that my radar says is around here somewhere."

"Dragon balls?!" Seina exclaimed, laughing. "That sounds like something Ripo would make a stew out of!"

"No, no," Matt said over the sound of Elder's raucous laughter. "Not like that. Dragon balls are these orange spheres with stars on them, or so I've heard."

"I'm sorry," said Seina. "I wasn't trying to be insulting. I've never seen anything like that around here."

"Nor have I," Elder added. "But your… erm, what was it? Radar?"

"Yes, sir."

"Your radar said it was here. Well, I'd be happy to let Simone escort you to the place on your radar where it says the ball is. Now, I have to say, we withhold the right to keep the ball for ourselves or sell it to you if it's really on our island. By proclamation of the king, we are the rightful owners of this place."

"Sir, I understand," said Matt, "but I really want that dragon ball, and it's like I said earlier, I will trade for it. I have my car parked on the shore of the island, several yards that way—" he pointed, and Seina and Elder looked.

"Oh," said Elder, "I think I see it. You must've used the ferry. Most people use that to get to the island not far behind this one. Of course, we like to send people off the island sometimes for supplies or to let them earn money to send back over here. But this place is still all about trade, even in this zenie-ridden age of ours, and we will happily barter with you if there's something you've got that we want."

"That's fine with me," Matt said with a small sigh. He studied Elder's craggy but gentle face for any sign of subterfuge. He wasn't at all fond of the man's tone regarding trade, even if he didn't want to show that. That ball, as far as he was concerned, was either his or nobody's, and if that meant having to explain the nature of the dragon balls to this old man, then so be it. But… if he told these people about the wish-dranting dragon… and they believed him… what would they do to him?

Matt took Elder's hand, and shook.


	4. Buried

"Knock, knock!"

Those words, punctuated by quick taps on Matt's car window, shook him out of a short, troubled nap. He sat up, and Seina's face was there to meet his upright. For the first time, he considered the gorgeousness of her face—and not just that, but the gentleness. It had all the geniality of her father's now-rugged visage, but there was also a rather subversive intelligence flying just beneath the radar.

She grinned a little. "Didn't mean to wake you, but Simone's ready to take you to the place. Where's your stuff at?"

Matt brushed his hair with his hands, feeling the cool sweat between his fingers, then leaned forward to open the door.

"It's been a really long time since I've seen a car," said Seina. "I like the shape, but it's kind of an ugly color."

"Yeah?" Matt said, half-listening. How long had he been asleep? It felt like only fifteen or twenty minutes.

"What kind of car is it?"

Matt shrugged. "I don't know, I never pay attention to that stuff. I inherited it from a dead grandparent."

"Aww."

"So, where is Simone, exactly?"

"In front of that same hut you talked to him at."

Matt opened the trunk. "Why isn't he here? Like, why didn't he come with you?"

"I don't know."

"He hates me, doesn't he?"

Seina laughed. "He hates a lot of things. I think he thinks there are monsters out where you came from."

"Hmm." Matt felt Seina come over to stand right next to him, looking with him down at the supplies in the trunk. "You have any clothes?" she asked.

"Besides mine? No."

Matt glanced over at her just long enough to drink in her figure. She—like everyone else in the village—wore loose fitting robe-like garments, covering most of her skin while leaving plenty of room to breathe. "Yeah, I saw you looking. The rest of my clothes are just like this. It's boring."

"Why don't you just go on the ferry," Matt asked, "and buy yourself some new stuff?"

"Are you kidding? With what money?"

A part of him really didn't care. Another part really wanted to see her in more tight-fitting clothes. He wiped some more sweat off of his forehead. "It's awful humid out here, for a desert."

"Really?" said Seina. "I think it's pretty mild. Anyway, I'm digging in."

Seina reached into the trunk and started to rummage messily through it.

"Wait! You're going to—"

"Hey, there's a lot of food in here," said Seina.

"Well, yes, I planned on being off for a long trip. The rest of the dragon balls are scattered all over the place."

"All over what place?"

"The world."

Seina froze in a slightly hunched over position, her hands still stuck in the pile of food and clothes in Matt's trunk. "The world?" She repeated.

"Yes. I need a lot of that food."

"Wouldn't you need more than that?"

"Yeah."

Seina straightened up and regarded Matt with an expression that startled him, because it was the first time he'd ever seen her wear it in the very short time he had known her. She was serious. "You're going to need a loooot more than that. There's no way you can give any of that up for the dragon ball and get to the other six."

"Okay…" Matt said. "Then I need to just take the dragon ball and run?"

"Yes."

The wind blew lightly through the trees, making cracks in Matt's stunned silence. Seina's expression was suddenly as cold and determined as he'd ever seen someone look. "Forget about Simone. Let me go with you, and we'll look for the dragon ball together."

"What?!"

Seina stepped closer. "I'll help you get the dragon ball, then you need to get the heck out of here, before my father and Simone figure out what you did."

"Why?! What do you want from me?"

"Nothing!" Seina shouted. "I'm the only one here who doesn't want anything from you! When my Dad saw you coming, the first thing he thought of was how much he could get from you, that's why he was being so nice to you when you talked! Matt, he just wants to rip you off!"

"I know that!"

Seina's mouth hung open to say something, but her eyes—which went from laser-focused to wandering everywhere but Matt's face in less than a second—made it all too clear she couldn't figure out what to say to him. She hadn't expected herself to be in this position at all.

"I know your old man wants to cheat me," Matt continued in a stern tone, "and I don't care. I want that dragon ball, and I'm willing to take the risk of losing a lot of food if it means I can get my hands on it. You have no idea at all what that ball means to me, and it isn't any of your goddamn business anyway!"

With that, Matt stomped toward the straw hut in the distance, brushing his arm against Seina's as he did so. She didn't turn to watch him leave, but instead looked sadly at the trunk full of food. Much of it was stuff she'd never seen before in her life. In this near-barren island, very few things could be grown, and the stuff that did grow was often strangely bitter. Eating, for her people, was no more enjoyable than the effort it took to grow it.

"You don't know how lucky you have it, Matt," she said out loud, turning finally to make sure he wasn't close enough to hear it.

"Okay," said Matt, "are you ready to go, Simone?"

"Obviously, I am," Simone sneered back. "I wouldn't have called you out here if I weren't. Do you have the radar with you?"

"Obviously, I do," Matt said. "I wouldn't have answered your call if I didn't. Do you have a shovel with you?"

"You don't?" was Simone's sharp reply. "What do I look like to you, a tool shed?"

Matt groaned and slapped his forehead. This time, he didn't have a pithy reply. This was something he should have been expecting to happen.

"Looks like you and I are going to be digging with our hands. Now, come on, let's go."

Matt and Simone were about halfway to the dragon ball, when it suddenly became obvious to Matt that Simone already knew where to go.

" _What does this mean?"_ he thought to himself as they kept walking. When they first started, Matt was well ahead of Simone, but now they were right next to each other, and Simone seemed willing to keep on going on his own, leaving Matt behind with his unneeded radar. At first, he thought he may have just been paranoid. Simone was obviously just really good at following directions. One thing he was not good at, however, was hiding his complete lack of need for Matt's input. "Let's go" were the last two words said between them, where Matt normally would have expected him to ask any question like "how much longer" or "are you sure we're going the right way". Simone was not the kind of man who took a back seat for things like this, Matt knew that just from the two brief interactions they'd had. This man already knew where the ball was. It was the only thing that made any sense.

Ten feet away from the dragon ball, Simone pointed at a small, dark patch of dirt that was clearly made by a person. "Let me guess, Matt. The ball's right there?"

Matt stood where he was, nodding his head slowly, his mouth drying out because of a combination of heat and nerves. To emphasize his already obvious point, Simone walked over to the dirt patch and patted it with one of his bare feet. "Right here. This isn't too far from where I found it."

"Why have you been—"

"You need to get out of this place. Today."

Simone and Matt met eyes for the first time during the course of their trip. "I'm not leaving, Simone," Matt said. "If you had been talking to the version of myself I left in Gasket, he would have left here before you even needed to say it. But not me. I have to have your dragon ball."

"If you think you can take it away from me," said Simone, "then let's do it."

"What do you mean?" Matt asked, for no other reason than to make it official.

"I mean, bring it on, man. I mean, let's see you dig this dragon ball up before I break your ribs. I mean, you have only a few seconds to get that dragon ball out of the ground and run for your life with it before I have to tell the village chief you were eaten by a bear."

"There aren't any bears around here!" Matt protested.

"The chief doesn't care, he'll tell Seina that while I loot you for everything you have. Last warning, ghost face—get out of my village."

"Seina knows," said Matt. "She knows you were out here with me. She's the one who told me to get the dragon ball and run with it while I had—"

"SHUT UP!" screamed Simone. "That's a goddamn lie! You little—"

Simone rushed Matt, who was just barely able to side-step him. Simone catapulted face-first into the ground, barking out in pain when he felt the cartilage of his nose bend out of shape.

"Are you done?" Matt asked, unsure of what else to say. His heart was throbbing so hard, he could almost feel it pressing against his ribcage. Simone jumped up and turned to face Matt. His nose was jammed toward the left side of his face, and Matt had to bite the insides of his cheeks to stop from laughing.

"You are." Simone said before taking off his robe, leaving him in nothing more than a pair of slightly oversized boxer shorts. "You let it come to this, now let's go. I'm putting you right next to that dragon ball, under the ground."

Matt raised his hands defensively. "I'm not fighting you."

"I'm fighting you," replied Simone. This time, he inched carefully toward Matt, making quick but deliberate movements. His fists were raised in front of his own face like a boxer would do. Matt shook his head and backed away just as slowly as Simone came forward, leaving a gap between them Matt thought might be big enough to give him the edge if he decided to run. But he knew he wouldn't run. He might not fight back, he might let whatever happens happen, but he wouldn't run. This was all he cared about, this dragon ball, and he wasn't going to be shaken from his goal by some young kid.

When Matt's eyes suddenly drifted in the direction of where the dragon ball was buried, that was all Simone needed. He was in Matt's face in a flash, his fist soared through the air and caught the side of the older man's jaw with a haymaker. Matt felt himself become airborne for just a split second, then a crashing feeling on his back threw him into a daze. All he could see was the blue sky and a couple of clouds that were fuzzier than usual. There wasn't any pain—he just felt a tremendous pressure all around his head, like he had gained weight around it in a very short moment. There was a lurching moan coming from somewhere far away, and he couldn't pinpoint it.

"Get up!" Simone yelled before delivering a sharp kick to Matt's ribs. When the moan broke into a girlish yelp, he realized the noise was coming from him all along, and tears began to congregate beneath his eyes. "You crying?! I told you I'd do it, didn't I?! Get up, now?!"

Another girlish cry came from far away, and Matt wondered if it was him again or not. The clouds were no longer so fuzzy, and with every beat of his heart he felt more and more pain on his jaw and his chest. The cry sounded again, and got closer. "Seina! Get out of here, this guy just tried to steal our dragon ball!"

"He didn't!" Seina countered. "I watched the whole thing! Well, our engagement is over, Simone! You hear me?! OVER! I don't care if father wants to exile me from this village, I am never going to marry you…"

Her voice was getting quieter, but not of her doing. Matt entered unconsciousness as soon as he understood he was fading.

"Are you awake?"

Matt took his time to consider the question, his brain fighting through the pain in his head. "Y-Yes."

The room was lit with a lone candle, and Matt could see that the walls were straw. "You're in my house, Matt."

"Your house?"

"You could say it's more of a hut, I suppose. You probably once lived in a house, I never have. I know it's not much to look at, that's why I stay out of it as much as I can. Do you need water?"

He did, but he wasn't ready for her to leave just yet. "Where's Simone? What happened to him?"

"Well, he's taken a pretty good scolding from father for the stunt he pulled near the shore," Seina explained. "But, to tell you the truth, I'm in it even worse."

Seina couldn't tell if Matt's expression was confusion or pain, so to be safe, she tried to elaborate further. "Father wants me to marry Simone, so when I told him I was refusing, he was furious. It was lucky for me I had you to show him as evidence what Simone did, or I would have been kicked out on the spot."

"Why would…" Matt paused to let the throbbing in his jaw subside. "…your father make you marry that guy?"

"Simone's the son of a very well-respected family, and so I'm to marry him. It was a choice between he and another boy, his name was… hmm… oh! Stoma, that's what it was!"

"Does everyone in the village have a name that starts with 's'?" asked Matt. Seina would have taken it as a joke, but Matt's was clearly dead serious, which made the question funnier. She giggled for a moment, then replied. "No. There's 'Chief,' who you already met. Then there's—"

"It's fine, it's fine…" Matt said. A line of saliva was escaping down the swollen half of his jaw, and when he tried to wipe it away, there was a horrible sting across that entire side of his head. "God!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Matt," Seina groaned, seeming to feel his pain as well. "I got there as fast as I saw Simone attack. I can't believe he had the nerve to start a fight with you, over me of all things!"

"It wasn't just you…"

Seina blinked. "What, then?"

"The ball," Matt said. "He's protecting the ball, he buried it himself. I don't know why. Maybe he thinks he can sell it and make a bunch of money or something…"

"The bastard!" Seina snapped, and covered her mouth with her hand, turning to look out the window for anyone who might have heard. "The bastard," she repeated quietly. "How could he hide something like that from us?"

Matt had no answer. He wished he did. Simone attacked before Matt could even begin to think of what Simone would want with the dragon ball. Did he… know? If he did, why didn't anyone else?

"My father's going to be here in a few minutes," Seina said in a low voice. "I need you to pretend to still be out of it. If he thinks you're unconscious, he'll let me take care of you overnight. You can leave early tomorrow morning, get the ball, and go. Fast."

They waited, and after what felt like an hour or two through Matt's floaty, strained experience of time, the silhouette of Chief's dark figure filtered in through the front door. Matt shut his eyes.

"How is he?" asked Chief.

"How is Simone?" asked Seina.

"He's been admonished, don't you worry. Now what about Matt?"

"Matt's been asleep," she said after a little hesitation. "I think he'll be okay tomorrow."

"You'll have to keep him overnight?"

"Yes."

Matt could feel Chief's irritation through the cold silence. Seina's voice had to break it. "I wouldn't try to wake him up, father, he—"

"I need the keys to his vehicle."

It took every inch of Matt's concentration to stop his eyes from shooting open. He wondered, with a stomach full of hot ice, if he had just given himself away, had reacted in some nebulous way that Chief noticed. Matt continued to concentrate as he felt a hand pawing around near his right pocket.

"Stop it!" came Seina's voice. The hand withdrew. "Why are you taking Matt's keys?"

"Seina, be quiet!" was Chief's harshly-whispered reply. "We need to get his supplies, or else we'll have to start sending more people off the island. We've already lost twenty people this past year!"

"We aren't thieves, Daddy!"

"Seina! We don't have a choice! Now, I'm sorry for how this happened, and I told Simone he was in danger of being sent away—"

"Simone knew about the dragon ball!"

A pause. "What, now?"

"Simone beat up Matt because Simone knew where the dragon ball was—he found it, and buried it. He didn't want to let Matt take it, so he attacked him. Father, you should—"

"I'm going to give that boy the lashing of his life for hiding that ball from us!" Chief yelled, startling Matt into flinching. He could hear, beneath the shouting, Seina's voice trying to shush him. "We're in poverty, and he's walking around like a king, with you draped around his shoulder! I gave him everything he could ask for, and more, and this is how he repays me?!"

This time, the pause was so long, Matt assumed the Chief left until he heard Seina speak up. "Father," she said quietly, "do you still expect me to marry him?"

"Of course I do!" he bit back. "How could you even ask that?! Simone's going to get his lashes, but I'm not breaking your engagement off this far down the line! Besides, when he brings me that dragon ball, we can get such a high price for it on the mainland, we'll never have to worry about poverty again. To be truthful, I'm quite happy to see how things have turned out."

"I won't," said Seina. "I won't marry him. I can't. I-I—"

"Yes, you will," said Chief in a simple tone. "You'll do as I say. You're tired, it's been a long day, you don't need to be up all night looking after him. Just let me have his keys."

"You don't need his supplies anymore, if you're already taking his dragon ball—"

"His dragon ball? HIS dragon ball?! What gives him the right to it?! Because he has some fancy little gadget to find it?! I'll stamp on it here and now—"

Once again, he felt a hand, then two hands, pawing each of his pockets. Underneath Matt's lips, his teeth were gritting against each other with such terrible force, he felt suddenly like his teeth were no longer made of calcium, but of rubber, and at any moment they would bend out of their sockets and start to bleed.

When he heard the sob at first, he thought it came from him, and a sweat formed near the top of his head. The rustling sounds and the feeling of being pawed on went quiet, and he heard the sound again.

"Seina, stop."

"No!" Seina said through another sob. "You stop!"

"Stop crying, please. I—Look, I'm not touching him anymore. Is that what you want?"

Seina didn't say anything, but he could still hear her sniffling. Matt wondered how Chief could be falling for her obvious fake-crying. Especially because it sounds like something she's done all the time to get her way.

"Seina, listen," said Chief, "I am under a lot of pressure to do what's best for all of us. I need you to understand—this isn't going to be a common thing. When we get that ball, the sky's the limit. I swear it to you, honey, the sky's the limit."

"I never want to see you this way, daddy!" Seina erupted. "With your hands all over some passed-out man, trying to steal because you're desperate! Well, we're all desperate! But we can't—we can't do that, there are some things we just can't do!"

"You're tired," said Chief after what felt like years of quiet. "We'll talk more in the morning. I'll hold off for now, if that's what you really want."

The Chief left the hut. When Matt opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Seina's face hovering above his.

"We're leaving. Tomorrow morning. Sunrise."

She licked her finger and put the candle out before she left.


	5. The Beach Incident

When Chief woke, it was—according to the hand-me-down watch he could never really trust—about 6:30 a.m. The world outside was lit by a dim smattering of light far in the east, a lazy, blue pallor that made everything look perfectly hopeless. With a deep sigh, he sat up in his bed and yawned. His portly body jiggled with the effort.

His feet met with the cold, dried-mud floor and a chill went straight up through his body, so different—so peculiar—was this feeling that it almost knocked him back onto his bed. A mild unease had settled into his stomach that didn't normally reside there. It had nestled itself somewhere just behind his hunger, and was now starting to rise above it and become the most prevalent thing on his mind. Fear welled up in him like a phoenix rising from the ashes, and when he closed his eyes, he learned why; the image of his daughter, protecting that bum from out of town, stuck behind his eyelids.

Truth be told, he had meant to go back to his daughter's spare hut where she was keeping Matt. He had every intention of waiting until the both of them were sleeping, then take the radar. If his daughter couldn't be reasoned with, she'd have to settle for being a minor obstacle. But it turned out a bigger obstacle was the Chief's special ability to sleep through a tornado if necessary. He knew he'd set an alarm on his watch, some kind of tone was supposed to go off. He either set it for p.m. or woke up and turned it off. Whatever the case, he couldn't remember.

The world outside was slightly chilly, so Chief tossed on an overcoat he normally hated to wear. It felt bulky and clumsy around his shoulders, like a weak man trying to bring him down. The chances were low that Seina was still sleeping. For whatever reason, she seemed to feel like she owed this ghost-colored stranger an apology for an intrusion that was his own fault to begin with. Right from the first moment their eyes met, Chief hated the man, and he would have bet his paltry life savings the man hated him even more. When he heard from Seina about what Simone did, the first thing he did with Simone when they were alone was to clap him on the back and offer him a warm beer.

The Chief peeked in through the open doorway to Seina's cabin. Unless his eyes were deceiving him, the place was empty. When he squinted, he could see the empty bed where Matt's beaten body once laid.

"Oh, no…" the Chief whispered harshly. "No, no, no. You didn't."

He ran from the room as fast as his jiggling, weary body would allow and headed straight over to Simone's cabin. It, too, was abandoned.

"Damn it!" In his rage, he took a chunk of straw out of Simone's doorway and threw it on his bed. Then he screamed semi-sensibly to a small crowd he didn't know was listening, walking through Simone's cabin, breaking only the things he knew were replaceable. In his mind's eye, he could see only conspiracy—Simone and Seina, laughing together, with Matt holding the dragon ball, leading him away from the village. Chief didn't need to be told that all the young people in the village wanted a taste of the outside world, they only had to turn their backs on him, a message much louder than words. "I will not be disrespected like this! Where is my daughter! Where are you, Simone?! And you, 'Matt,' when I find you, I'm going to—"

A sudden sensation of not being alone came over Chief, and he looked down to see human shadows bending in his direction, flirting with his bare feet. When he turned, he found himself greeted by a group of wary villagers. One of them, the one closest, waved awkwardly at him. "Uh, sorry. We heard noises. Are you—"

"Okay?" Chief questioned, letting the false veneer of constant joviality he wore around the other villagers fall over him like a bedsheet. "Oh, I'm just—my daughter seems to be missing."

"Missing?" asked the other villager. "Do you think she may have been kidnapped?"

"Oh, don't say stuff like that!" A woman behind him said scoldingly. "That kind of talk is going to just rile everybody up, get them all scared!"

"No, he's right to ask," Chief said, allowing his smile to falter into a slow frown the more he continued to talk. "Because he might be right. I've been thinking about it ever since I woke up and found that my daughter was not in her cabin. I'm afraid she may have been kidnapped… and I think the one who did it is the stranger from out of town."

"And this," the other villager declared loudly for everyone to hear, "is exactly why the ferrymen need to go! We have all that we need here already, we do not need a way for mainlanders to come here and terrorize us!"

"Tylsi, be quiet! You're just trying to stir up trouble!"

"It's the truth!"

"I have to agree with Tylsi," a shy woman in the back of the gathering crowd called, baby cradled in her arms. "All kinds of people are going to come over here, gawking at us like animals in a cage, unless we do something! I don't want my child to grow up a spectacle!"

Arguments in the form of loud murmurs began to billow forth from the villagers, until Chief raised his voice to silence them. He'd cooked up what he thought was a pretty nice sermon for the rubes. "I think what we have here is a consensus. We need to start with finding the stranger, getting my daughter back, and then we're going to tear down the ferry once and for all! It was a bad idea to have it built in the first place, and I'll admit to that, here and now! But the past is the past, and now it's time to save our future!"

()()()

Seina and Matt stood a few sparse feet from the car, listening to the commotion that had erupted from where they'd been. Matt had the dragon ball in a small knapsack, and was idly twirling it like a sling. "We better hurry," said Seina. "Dad's coming to get us, and he's not coming alone."

Matt sighed and rubbed the ache on his face, courtesy of his fight yesterday. "Do you need another painkiller?" Seina asked him. "I can give you as much as you need, I don't have to worry about smuggling any more from the mainland."

Before Matt could answer, Seina clasped her hands loudly together. "You have no idea how long I've waited… it's been so hard, trapped in this tiny place, knowing that a whole, huge world was out there that I wasn't allowed to see. You, really—you're lucky. You can go anywhere you want!"

"There's only six more places I'm going to," Matt said. "After that, it's back home for me. Gasket wasn't much bigger than where you've been living, but I liked it there."

Seina looked at him and nodded. "That's fine. I'll check it out, but don't be surprised if I'm gone the next day. Too much out there to see."

"We've already stood around talking too long," Matt said gruffly. "Let's get out of here."

Matt and Seina walked to the car, both of them heading for the driver's side door. When they got there, Matt turned to Seina. "I'm driving. Go around to the other side."

"Teach me how to drive."

"Seina, for the love of—"

"Come on! At least let me try pulling into the ferry."

"Fine, but we have to go, now!"

Matt started to walk around the car, but when he got past the left rear tire, he felt a sudden sharp pain right below his ankle. Matt's scream drowned out the sound of Seina's. He was in so much agony for a moment, he couldn't even think to look down. Yanking his foot away, Matt tripped and landed on his side just in time to see a figure roll out from under the car, bloody piece of glass in his hand.

"Simone!" screamed Seina.

Simone jumped into a standing position and stared Seina down. "The two of you are going back to the village with me. I heard everything!"

"This isn't your choice to make!" Seina said. "You're a bastard! You'll have to stab me with that thing before I marry you!"

"Okay, bitch! Maybe I will!" Simone lunged at Seina, who screamed and tried to run, but had a big lock of her hair caught in her ex-fiancee's fist before she could get any distance between them both. As the two struggled in the sand right next to the car, the owner of that car was back on his feet, the cut in his tendon gushing every time he moved it. Matt bit down on his bottom lip and breathed in sharply with every flash of agony his foot gave off. He felt himself lucky at first that Simone had turned all of his attention to Seina. Perhaps, he thought, there was still time to wait for the ferry to arrive and make a clean getaway with the ball as the two islanders remained engaged. Nothing sounded better to Matt than the prospect of getting off the island and leaving this behind him.

But when he tried to walk away, he froze, and not just because of the pain. His car was still there, for one thing, and with it all of his supplies. Even his money. But right next to the car, now pinned underneath Simone, was Seina, who had rescued him just yesterday from the same man who now held her captive. His fist clenched with rage at remembering the fight yesterday, and that's when he realized, the knapsack with the ball inside was still in his right hand. For the first time, he was able to stop and consider the weight of the thing. It was like a small crystal ball, or a good-sized rock that, with a little force, could bust through bone.

"You think you're going anywhere, bitch?!" Simone yelled, clutching Seina's throat with one hand while, with the other hand, he stuck the bloody piece of glass into the front left tire of Matt's car. "You're not getting very far in this thing now, are you?!"

"Simone… please…" Seina choked out. Simone's grip loosened slightly around the woman's throat. Seina tried not to focus her eyes too long on the shape in the corner of her eye, the shape of Matt getting bigger and bigger in her line of vision, leering behind Simone with the dragon ball, still covered by the knapsack, raised above his head. "Why did you betray me like this?" he said in a low voice. "I… you would have been…"

"Let me up, Simone, please," she begged. "We can talk about this!"

"We will, Seina, we will. But it's going to be at the village."

"Okay. Okay, we'll go right now."

"And Matt?! What about the outsider son-of-a-bitch?!"

"Right here."

Simone had less than a second to be startled by Matt's voice behind him before the wounded man swung the sack with all of his force and hit Simone squarely on top of his head. Simone swayed on top of Seina, his grip on her throat releasing entirely. Seina looked at Simone's face in horror, as his eyes lost their focus and his mouth parted slightly. She screamed out when Matt swung again. "Get off of her," he commanded as the ball connected with the side of Simone's head that time. Simone's world exploded right in front of his eyes with the second blow, having been hit directly on his temple. His body, now limp and without autonomy, fell to the side, and Seina scooted out from under him.

"You—you killed him," Seina said in a shaky and quiet voice. "I think you killed him."

"I don't think so," Matt replied after a big, deep breath, but on the inside he agreed that it was very possible. He hadn't intended to hit him a second time with the ball.

"He wouldn't get off of you," Matt explained. Seina heard his uncertainty showing through his fake confidence. "I had no choice."

"I was okay, Matt," she said. She became louder and louder. "I had him talked down. It wasn't your battle to fight, it was mine!"

"Not anymore!" Matt shouted back. "Not after what he did to my foot and my goddamn car! Do you realize we now have no way of getting to the next six balls?! I don't have enough money to get a brand new tire! This is all your fault!"

"My fault?! It was his ball you wanted, this started because of you!"

"Well, now it's over," Matt declared, "and so are we. Drag this sorry piece of trash," he nudged his head toward Simone's body, "back to your village and forget I was ever here. Maybe he'll live if you—"

"You monster!"

Matt and Seina peeked out from the side of his car to see none other than Chief and a small procession of villagers hastily walking toward them. Chief's eyes were fixated on Simone. "What have you done?!"

Seina burst into spontaneous tears as Matt stared at Chief, his mind becoming a rolodex of excuses and explanations in the face of the man's makeshift army. "Answer me!" screamed Chief, jolting Matt out of his trance.

"He attacked us," Matt said in a near-whisper.

"What?!" the Chief yelled.

"He was hiding underneath Matt's car," Seina jumped in and explained. "He stabbed Matt with a piece of glass and look," she lifted her chin and pointed out the reddening marks on her throat, "he tried to kill me!"

"You," Chief growled, approaching Seina while the crowd eyeballed either her, Matt or Seina. Matt was surprised at the docility of the mob. They didn't even seem to know what to do. "What were you planning to do with this—this mainlander?!"

"Leave!" said Seina. "I'm leaving you and Simone behind!"

"Why?!"

"To live!"

"That's ridiculous!"

"It's not, really," Matt said. "You—"

The increasingly enraged village leader snapped his attention away from Seina, glaring daggers into Matt. "Stay out of this!"

"No!" Matt glared his own daggers back at Chief, who he had seen more than enough of for one lifetime in the span of merely 24 hours. "You don't seem to understand, this isn't the goddamn dark ages, you don't just get to boss a grown woman around just because she's your daughter!"

"I DAMN WELL DO!" Chief shrieked, quickly bridging the distance between himself and Matt, their faces an inch apart. "You're not leaving this island alive at this rate, so bite your tongue! In fact—you!" Chief turned and called out to the other villagers. "Why haven't you grabbed him yet?! Do I need to do everything?!"

With a command issued, the mob moved to seize Matt. Thinking on his feet, Matt knocked Chief to the ground with a violent shove and lunged toward Simone, whose head now laid in a growing pool of its own blood. Matt grabbed the glass shard from Simone's lifeless hand and held it at his throat. The villagers stopped, many of them gasping in terror. "Don't go any further!" One of them shouted.

"Good advice," Matt said harshly. "Believe it or not, I feel a pulse. Simone's still alive. Seina, come here, stand next to me."

"The ferry!" she said, pointing at said ferry approaching the beach. "It's going to be here in a second, we need to get on it!"

"I know," Matt said, his attention still paid only to the scared crowd in front of him. "This guy's important, right? That's why you, Seina, you were engaged to him, right? It was a political marriage?"

"He—yes, he's the son of one of our village's richest men. Why?"

"It'd just be a real shame if something happened to him."

"Don't you dare!" shouted the village leader, back on his feet. "If anything happens to that boy, you will pay with your own life!"

"Nothing's going to happen," replied Matt in a kinder voice, "as long as Seina and I get to leave the island. That's all we want. Just let us on the ferry, and we'll give you Simone back. I guarantee it."

"You can go," Chief said, "but Seina must stay."

"No, father."

Chief looked into his daughter's face. "Seina, please. Don't leave us. Don't."

Seina watched her father's anger dissipate into fear. She felt in her gut how important this moment was. For the first time in a long time, this wasn't Chief, the politician. This was just her father. "Dad," she sobbed, wiping tears away. "I have to go."

The old man closed his eyes and drew in a shuddering breath. He turned and walked over to the gathered crowd. "When the two of them get on the ferry, I need someone to help me pick up Simone and take him back to the village."

Minutes later, the ferry arrived. "Who can drive?" Matt asked. A villager raised his hand, and he was selected to pull Matt's car, bad tire and all, into the ferry. Then, not taking his eyes off of the crowd, Matt himself backed slowly up into the boat, dragging Simone with him until they were right at the entrance. He left the body and jumped into the driver's seat. With one last parting glance at her pained father, she joined her newfound partner in the passenger seat, and the ferry took off.

()()()

"Matt," Seina said, peering intently into the rearview mirror where she could see the villagers gathered around Simone's body. "Was it true? Did Simone have a pulse?"

"…Yeah," Matt lied.


	6. Hoofing It

"How's the foot?" was the first thing Seina said when the ferry docked back onto the mainland. When Matt heard her question, he winced. Truth be told, in all the excitement of struggling with Simone and dealing with the villagers, he'd forgotten about the foot. The pain was a distant memory to him in those moments, courtesy of adrenaline. But now, in his more relaxed state, the throbbing sting in his right foot recommenced, even worse this time. He got out of his car and bent down to look at it. The wound was so deep, he could almost see his Achilles tendon splitting.

"Not so good," replied Matt. "I guess I'm going to need to get this patched up somewhere. We need to get to a city."

"With your tire as bad as it is?" Seina said.

"No. I should have a spare in the trunk."

Seina exited the car and the two of them walked off the ferry. "Hold up," said the ferryman, jumping off of the boat after them. "I need to have a word with the two of yous."

"About what?" Matt asked. "We're kind of in a hurry, sir."

"I saw what happened. What y'all did."

Matt's stomach dropped precipitously and he could almost feel Seina freeze in place next to him. "What are you talking about?"

"You caved that feller's head in with a rock or something. I saw it while I was on the boat."

"And?"

"And?" The ferryman, whose tag on his shirt read "Hagar," repeated, laughing. "Shit, boy, I thought you'd understand. Here, lemme dumb it down. What are you two willin' to give me to keep my mouth shut on this?"

"We have so little as it is," Seina said. "Please, sir. The man on the island is alive, they're taking care of him."

"Aww, come on," Hagar guffawed in response. "You can't expect me to believe that shit! I saw blood spray off that bastard's noggin from all the way across the water! You'd have to get me up pretty darn early in the morning to get me to believe that guy's ever walkin' again!"

Matt felt naked. He'd left the dragon ball inside the car, so there was no bludgeoning this man as he'd done with Simone—something he was willing to do, if that's what it took to get him back on the road. The ferryman had a good 100-pound weight advantage over Matt as well.

"Tell you what," said Hagar," what's your name, girly?"

Seina shook at Hagar's sudden change in his tone of voice. "Seina."

"Shayna?"

"No, 'say-nuh,'" Matt said.

"Odd name. Tell you what, Seina—"

"You can stop right there," said Matt, looking the ferryman in the eyes for the first time in the conversation. "I know exactly what you're thinking. Forget it."

"Well, that puts you in a really tight spot, boy," Hagar replied. "The way I see it, either I get the chickie-poo for the day, or I'm going to have to appropriate that car of your'n."

"You bastard."

"Call me what you want. So what's it gonna be? My cellphone here is pretty good, it gets service all the way out here in the boonies. Cops are gonna have a hell of a time talking to all them witnesses out on the island."

Matt looked over at Seina. "Well? What should I do?"

Seina's face contorted with anger. "How can you even think about it?! Give him the car!" Seina marched over to the ferryman until she was right in his face. "You aren't going to be my first, you son of a bitch!"

Matt's jaw unhinged very slightly. When Hagar smiled at her—those wormy little lips of his curving beneath his graying mustache—her face grew hot. "We have a deal?" he asked, addressing Matt.

"I guess so. But I want to get all of my belongings out of there first."

"Fine with me."

The first thing Matt went for was the dragon ball and the radar sitting in his front seat. He was acutely aware of the presence of Hagar the ferryman right behind him, glaring over his shoulder. It made sense. After all, how was he to know Matt wasn't carrying a gun or a knife? "Hold up, isn't that what you used to kill that guy up there?"

Matt looked at the knapsack in his hand, stained with Simone's blood, and then sighed. "It's what I used to hit him."

"Pretty stupid of you to want to hold on to that."

"Even more stupid of you to want to keep it in your new car, asshole."

Hagar laughed. "I guess that's true enough. Get moving—I want to get the spare on this hunk of shit before noon. It'll be nice to be able to drive myself home for lunch. Yes, sir, no more getting rides from co-workers for me."

Matt could hear Seina loudly rustling through things in the trunk, and surmised that she was still very upset with what just happened to them both. Ever since Seina entered his life, Matt felt as though his luck had only worsened. He felt as though he should have just given her over to the ferryman. What was she to him, anyway? But then… what if she opted to let Hagar call the police? What if she went back to the island and somehow got the whole village to follow him to the ends of the earth, seeking revenge? Nothing seemed to have an easy answer. And now, without the car, he and Seina were stuck walking to the next city, where they would have to figure out how to get to the next dragon ball.

Within thirty minutes, the two of them departed, each carrying as much of Matt's supplies as they could carry. The rest of them were what Hagar considered his little "bonus." Matt swore to himself the first thing he'd do after getting all seven dragon balls would be to come back to this place and set his old car to fire in the dead of night. Or maybe even set fire to Hagar himself.

"Seina," Matt said, fighting to find his words through the fog of agony his right foot had caused to settle over him, "it's not too late to go back to your village, if this is too much for you. If there's anything I've learned from leaving my own home town, pieces of shit like that guy back there are all over the place. You can go back home and tell them I got turned in to the police or something. If you want."

Seina paused to set the things in one of her hands down so she could wipe sweat from her forehead. "Sorry," she replied, "but you won't get rid of me that easily. I made my bed back at the village by rebelling against my father in front of God and everyone. Besides, I'm having more fun doing this than sitting in my hut, waiting for the day I marry a man I don't love."

"I wasn't trying to get rid of you," Matt said. "But I hope you understand a little bit just how crazy things are going to get now." A pause. "You do understand, right?"

"Do you?" Seina asked. "That guy back there blackmailed us out of your car."

"That's low, Seina. You and I both know I had no choice."

"Don't get me started. You didn't have to do what you did to Simone, okay? Don't start."

Now it was Matt's turn to put down his things. "Oh, I'm going to start! If—"

"Just drop it!"

Matt was ready to keep arguing, but he shook his head and picked his things back up. He realized Seina was still shaken after the encounter with Simone. In time, he hoped she would come to understand why he had to do what he did. But that wouldn't be today, or even tomorrow, or next week.

As the two of them walked together in the serene, empty valley between the city and the shore, Matt felt a strange, troubled peace settling over him. There was a feeling of "it can't get any worse," for lack of a better term, that made the rest of the trip for the dragon balls seem less daunting. He had ended a human life with his own two hands, and the only consequence was that he didn't have his car anymore. He even had his supplies still, including the radar and the dragon ball. In a way, he felt unstoppable, but only until he thought about all the things that could have went wrong.

"Stop," said Matt to Seina, who had been walking in front of him for the past few minutes, "I need to wrap my foot up or something."

"With what?"

"There should be some kind of cloth I can used to stop this thing from bleeding. I've been bleeding out for the past few minutes and haven't even done anything about it, I—I really should know better."

"Just calm down," Seina said, "sit still for a second. I think I saw a roll of paper towels in one of these bags."

"Probably not, I only got food."

"Really? No first aid things? Those were my first priority every time I left the village for a supply run."

"Don't rub it in."

"Whatever. Look—what about that sack you were using to carry the dragon ball?"

"The one with blood stains on it?"

Seina glared at Matt. "We can rip off those parts. Give me the sack."

Matt took out the dragon ball and tossed the sack at Seina's feet. She proceeded to yank and pull at it, with no results. "Damn thing…" Eventually, she resorted to biting until she managed to put a hole in it. From there, she was able to separate a large chunk of it away from the rest of the bag. "Here, we can tie this around your foot until we make it to the city."

"Okay…" Matt stared at the strip of cloth draped over the palm of his hand like a dead limb. All of his sense of feeling indestructible dissipated as he shrank at the minor task before him, not because he didn't know how, but because the color of the cloth made him remember the sick, snapping sound Simone's head made when the dragon ball connected against the side of it. It reminded him of a bunch of spaghetti being ripped in half, the sound of it.

"Matt, you're crying."

Seina knelt down to look closely at Matt's face as he looked up at her in surprise. A single tear was trailing down each side of his face. He still held the same stoic expression as always. He touched the skin beneath his eyes and found out she was right.

"I guess I am," grunted Matt. "I don't know how I didn't notice."

"You must be in a lot of pain."

"Yeah."

They sat there in silence until Seina was sure Matt wasn't going to break down entirely. Then she tied the cloth tightly around his foot and both of them moved onward.

()()()

By nightfall, the lights in the distance had come close enough to Matt and Seina that the two of them were illuminated. With bags hanging off of their arms where the elbow resided, they walked the sidewalks, not talking, unsure of what to do first.

"We need to find somewhere to stay," Seina said as they waited at a corner for the light to turn.

"There's probably a public park somewhere around here," Matt replied. "We can sleep on a bench, or a slide or something."

"Really?" Seina whined. "You won't even consider a room?"

"Seina, exactly how much money do you think I have right now? Because I'm pretty sure two days in a cheap hotel room would completely eat through my money."

"What?!"

"I was hoping you'd know more about the outside world than that."

"This is awful! How can you decide to do something like this when you barely have enough money to—"

"I expected to have my goddamn car to live in, you know!"

"Oh, now—"

"STOP!" Matt put his finger right up to Seina's face. "I'm not having the same argument with you. I told you earlier today, you can go back any time you feel like you don't want to do this anymore. This is my mission to see through to the end. Hell—you don't even have to go back to the village, if you'd rather just stake out on your own, that's okay, too. But you need to understand, this isn't some sight-seeing trip. From what I've been told, and the radar seems to back me up on this, these balls are spread out all over the world. We're in for months—maybe years—of searching, never staying in one place for too long, sleeping in uncomfortable spots almost every night… if you don't want to go through with all of that, now's the time to tell me."

Seina closed her eyes and turned away. Matt looked at how the bluish-white light invaded the woman's jet black hair, and was almost hypnotized when she finally spoke up. "I'm not having the same argument with you, either."

That night, they slept on two twin slides at a playground. They were woken up at 5 in the morning by a policeman and forced to go on their way.

()()()

"Goku!"

Chi-Chi called outside for her husband, who was playing around with Gohan and Icarus in the woods not far away. "What's up?!" he called back.

"Bulma called, she says she wants to talk to you!"

Goku raced home, Gohan sat atop his shoulder, and grabbed their antique of a phone from his wife's hand. "Hey, Bulma," he greeted in his usual cheerful way.

"Hey, Goku," Bulma replied, trying to match Goku's cheeriness and finding it impossible to do so as she stared thoughtfully at the half-finished piece of plastic and glass in her hand. "So, it's been a while since I heard from you about the dragon radar."

"Oh! I'm sorry, yeah, I went back to all the places you told me to look for it."

"Didn't find it?"

"No. I spent pretty much a whole day looking around, but I guess it wasn't enough. I'm real sorry about that."

Bulma pinched the bridge of her nose in irritation. Goku's cavalier attitude toward having dropped their only dragon radar had gotten on her nerves more than once since the day he'd done it. It was a simple favor she asked—once you're done looking for the four-star ball again, she said, bring that radar back. Well, he found the dragon ball, sure enough, but sometime between where he'd found it and West City, where Capsule Corp. was, he'd dropped it. By the sound of things, he dropped it from a height, so it would be a miracle if the thing even made it to the ground intact.

"Goku, I'm halfway done with another radar, and when it's finished, I'd like to bring it to your house so you can hold on to it," Bulma explained. "You need to promise me you'll be careful with this one. We don't want some weirdos like the Pilaf gang to grab it away from you and wish for world domination before we can even stop them."

"Bulma, come on," said Goku, half whining, "I beat King Piccolo AND his son! I can take care of anyone else who wants to use those balls to do evil!"

"Goku, not every single bad guy is some demon king," Bulma said. "Promise you'll be careful."

"Of course, Bulma, I promise."

()()()

"Have I ever told you why I'm looking around for these things?"

Seina shook her head, grinning a little. "I believe you told me it wasn't any of my goddamn business. That's how I remember it."

"Well. I guess it is now. Let's rest for a bit."

It was noon and they had reached the edge of the city, called Florenceville. It was a somewhat rich town, situated on the other side of the peninsula from where Seina's island was located. Their stop in the city netted them some much needed supplies, including a proper first-aid kit for Matt's foot and other future emergencies. All of their supplies were now in rolling suitcases or large backpacks. The two of them sat down beneath an overpass. Matt found himself speaking over the sounds of cars roaring past or driving over.

"The truth is, I was driving home one night a few months ago and I ran over a little girl." Matt tried to continue the story, but his breaths shook and he needed a second. He didn't want to look over at Seina, because he was afraid of what he might see on her face. "She went right out in front of my car. It was officially declared to be nothing but an accident, but… everyone in Gasket thinks I did it on purpose. Every one of them. I lived in that town my entire life, Seina, and I assumed when the trial started, everybody was going to see I was telling the truth. But the girl… Kathy… I lived in a small town, everyone knew who she was, and she was this angelic little girl. I was just the guy who ran her town. Cracked the windshield of his car against her face."

Matt felt his heart trying to beat its way through his ribs. "So I left Gasket," he continued, "having found this radar in the middle of a field somewhere outside of town. I didn't know what it meant, but when I saw it was a radar—I felt pulled. I felt like I was going to be told where to go by some sort of unseen force, that I didn't have to make that decision for myself. I wound up in East City. A woman there told me… Seina, are you listening?"

"Yes," she said, very quietly.

"You're not really going to believe me when I tell you this… I'm not sure I believe it myself… apparently, when you gather the seven dragon balls, you get a wish."

Matt waited for a response from Seina, something along the lines of either blatant laughter or anger at his naivety. Instead, all she said was, "a wish?"

"A wish. I know it sounds like a joke. Have you ever heard of the Red Ribbon Army?"

"Yes!" Seina gasped. "Yes, I have! A member of our village who went to the mainland for a supply run told us what he heard. They're supposed to be ruthless. Are—are they looking for them, too?!"

"No, no. Not anymore. There is no more Red Ribbon Army, they disbanded a few years ago. It was the balls they were looking for, though. This is from a former officer in the army, I met her in a bar the night I made it to East City. Seina… this is my chance to undo what I did to Kathy. This is my chance—just imagine, me walking back to Gasket with that girl alive, in my arms. I would be more than a hero to those people, I'd be a God. And the nightmares, they'd finally stop. I'd be able to sleep for longer than an hour at a stretch. I'd be able to stop… imagining… teeth stuck in the windshield of every car I step into."

Matt felt like he couldn't say anything else, so he lifted his head. Seina was standing in front of him, looking down at his hunched, sitting body. They stayed like that for a length of time that could have been 30 seconds or 5 minutes. "You're crying again, Matt."

He knew he was that time.


	7. Wilderness

_Three months later…_

"Seina."

"What now?"

"I'm sorry."

"Oh, you're sorry? Again? Really? Well, all is forgiven!"

"Seina, I mean it. What I did last night wasn't right."

"And the night before, and the night before that."

"…Yes. But I already apologized for those."

"Oh, Matt, for Christ's sake."

Seina turned around to look Matt in the face for the first time since they both woke up that morning. "I'm tired of having conversation with you every single day! I have my beliefs, you have yours, there's no point in one of us trying to convince the other! Now, I mean it, Matt, if this happens again, tonight or tomorrow night or next week or next month, I will leave. You can carry all of this stuff around yourself!"

Matt had no response. They continued to walk toward the direction of the very close second dragon ball. In this bitterly cold desert, the two of them had wandered for about a week. In one of Matt's hands was the handle of a Radio-Flyer wagon with two full gallons of water in it, and in the other was a bag full of cheap food—packages of instant ramen, pasta, the occasional potato meant to be cooked over an open fire, destined to taste like utter shit like everything else they'd both been eating for the past three months.

The first thing Matt decided he was going to do the next time they made it into a town was wash the disgusting clothes the both of them had been wearing over the course of their time in the desert. They only carried three changes of clothes with them into this desolate, dry place, and Matt shuddered to think what the shape of their clothes would have been like if they had been traveling through the desert in the middle of summer. Then again, as Matt thought about Seina's sweaty clothes clinging to her tight tan body, he realized there would be an upside or two after all.

"How much farther?"

Matt was jolted out of his own thoughts by Seina's tired voice. "Oh—uh," he took a look at the dragon radar after pulling it out of his jacket pocket. "It looks like we have about a mile to go. At least, that's what it looks like."

"Okay. Can we take a rest for a bit?"

"Uh…" Matt looked at his wristwatch—one he stole from a convenience store about a month ago without bothering to tell Seina he'd stolen it—and shrugged. "It's about fifteen 'till one, I guess we can afford to rest for a while. At this rate, we'll get to the ball way before sundown."

"I hope it isn't buried," Seina said after seating herself on the cold ground. "That's all we need right now."

"No shit," grunted Matt. "I guess we should've prepared for that. Bought a spade or something."

"How much do you even have left?"

"Like ten dollars."

Seina scoffed. "We're going to die if we don't get any more money."

"Tell me something I don't know." Matt tore a package of ramen and half and began to munch on the uncooked, dry contents. "Good luck finding a place that'll let you work with no car, no prior work experience, clothes that smell horrible—hell, do you even have any ID? I doubt it."

"I don't," Seina confessed. "But I do have an idea."

"Lay it on me, I guess."

"What if you stayed in the next city, looked for a job and a car, while I went out to get the third dragon ball myself?"

Matt stopped chewing his nearly stone-hard mouthful of ramen. "I, uh… I don't know. You'd be by yourself."

"I can handle myself, Matt."

"That's what I thought you'd say, but I don't know if I've seen anything that makes me believe that."

"Just because you haven't seen it," Seina said, her voice rising, "doesn't mean I don't have it! And, what do you know, anyway?! All I've seen you do is attack someone who had his back turned! Oh, and get your car stolen, mustn't forget that!"

Matt chuckled and shook his head. "You're really going to bring that up every single time you're losing an argument, aren't you?"

"I'll stop doing it when you stop pretending you're my bodyguard or something!"

"Okay. Fine. Go on ahead, try to find the third ball yourself. If you really think it's better for us to separate than to stick close and make it harder for anybody to take from us, be my guest. I'm not giving you the radar, though."

"Oh, there's a nice olive branch! How on earth am I going to find anything without the radar?!"

"Buy a spade!"

Matt finished his ramen and stood up after a few minutes of silence. It wasn't very long into the day, and it was already sickening him just to hear his partner's voice. Ever since the two of them began to travel together, they spent so much more time arguing than they did making any kind of progress—Matt sometimes thought about all the time he could have spent progressing that he used instead to argue with Seina or go along with what she thought was best.

It's not like she was a stupid person. Contrary to that, she was very practical-minded. But her solutions were conceived under the assumption that the world Matt lived in was anything like the one she grew up in, and that just wasn't true. Maybe after a few more years of living in this cold world Matt knew, she would even be smarter than he was. In the meantime, he had to find a way to make her understand that listening to him was the best choice going forward.

Seina stood up as well. "You don't trust me, do you?"

"I don't think you have enough experience out here," Matt replied, "to be making any serious decisions for the both of us yet. That's all."

"No, about the radar. You think I'd just steal the thing if you handed to me, don't you?"

Matt took the radar out of his pocket and tossed it at her. With a surprised yelp, she barely managed to catch it between her hand and her stomach. "Go ahead, Seina. Start running."

Seina threw the radar right back at Matt, catching him on the jaw. "Bastard." She picked up her things and walked away toward the estimable direction of their second dragon ball. "Bitch," whispered Matt under his breath in response.

()()()

"Well, here we are," Matt sighed. "According to the radar, we're standing right where the ball is supposed to be."

"Now what do we do?" asked Seina. "I mean, you, the big problem-solver guy, should have something in mind. Right?"

Matt ignored his companion's sarcasm and lifted one of the big gallon-bottles of water out of the wagon he'd been pulling behind him for months. "What are you doing?" Seina asked.

"Wetting the ground," said Matt. "We're going to dig with our bare hands."

"You're going to waste all our water?!" she yelled. "Way out here in the desert, you're just going to pour out our water?!"

"Not all of it, Seina. We need to get the dirt wet so we can get it out of the way and find the ball more easily."

"No, Matt, that's a really bad idea. I know you don't care if I think so, but it's really a bad idea. We're going to die of thirst out here before we ever reach a city if you decide to do this. Let's go to a city, get a spade, and come back. Okay?"

"What if someone else finds this ball before we can do all that shit, Seina? What if we aren't the only ones who have one of these?" He shoved the radar toward Seina's face for emphasis.

"You're missing the point, Matt—what if we DIE?!"

Matt put down the water bottle for a moment. "I tell you what, Seina. Why don't we make a deal."

"Matt, come on—"

"No, I'm serious. I'm going to pour half of this bottle on the ground, we'll still have a few sips left over and the full bottle that's still in the wagon. If I dig and manage to not find the ball after going down a full two feet, you can take the radar and the two balls when we get to the next city and we'll do what you want—I'll find a job, make some money, you can look for the third ball yourself."

"What if you DO find it? I can't wait to hear this."

"If I find the ball, you will sleep with me."

Seina's jaw unhinged in shock. About twenty different options for things to say in response materialized in her head at the same time, so quickly she felt her head begin to ache. "We… Matt, we talked about this. I said it to you last night, the night before, a THOUSAND TIMES—"

"So you don't want to prove me wrong?"

"I'm not having sex with you!"

"Now you're the one who's missing the point," Matt sighed. "Fine, make it a foot. If this ball is buried less than one foot under this dirt, that's the only risk you take. Think about it, Seina. You can have it your way—hell, it's practically guaranteed! Think about how long it's been since the last time anybody even used these things! This gadget—it's new, I bet whoever invented it didn't even have it long enough to use it to make a single wish! Think about how long this ball has been out here in the middle of the desert, getting covered up by layer after layer of dirt, because no one has ever been able to find it. Seina, this is a no-brainer."

"I told you already, Matt. I'm not—"

"You're right, chances are really good that you aren't. I have to warn you, though: this is going to be your only chance to get to give you the radar to use yourself. I know you want to prove that you can make it on your own. I'm giving you one—and ONLY one—chance to do that."

Seina turned away so he couldn't see the deeply thoughtful look on her face. All her life, she had been reared in the belief that sex had to wait until after the marriage ceremony. That was something she knew even a lot of mainlanders abided by, even though it probably wasn't a majority. Matt's pushiness had gotten on her nerves for the past week (or had it been two?), but she couldn't pretend with herself that she wasn't curious the way she could pretend with anybody else.

When she had those thoughts, all she had to do was look at Matt himself to realize it wasn't her old beliefs. She really had left a lot of that stuff back at the village. No, what it boiled down to was that she just didn't feel anything romantic or sexual for Matt Stoneman. She wasn't attracted to him physically—he had a very thin, pale countenance that really put her off—and as far as their personalities went, they clashed more often than not. The two of them were united by little more than circumstance.

One of the few truly positive things she could say for the man was that he really did have a heart, otherwise he wouldn't be putting himself through everything the two of them were going through just so he could bring one little girl back to life. Even though it would have been so much easier to leave behind a bad chapter of his life behind him, he faced it. Never once had he complained, or demurred, or had any sign that he would quit.

"How about this, Matt," said Seina, turning around. "If, after three or less handfuls, you see the ball sticking out of the ground, I'll… I'll do it."

"That doesn't give me a lot of wiggle room," Matt stated, the sexual entendre of his statement not lost on him as he fought back a grin.

"Tough luck, take it or leave it. That's the only offer I'm giving you, and you should be grateful I'm giving you that much."

Matt shrugged. "Yeah. Sounds good."

()()()

 _That night…_

Seina lay awake in the dark, sure that she would never be going to sleep on a night like this. Her pelvis was still sore from what Matt had won from her just a few hours ago. The son of a bitch had managed to find it in one handful. The way her heart just dropped when Matt practically yanked the ball out of the ground, she knew immediately that she had made a terrible mistake.

She'd had small fits of crying since they'd gone through with it. He hadn't lasted as long as she had expected, but it wasn't like her expectations were solid to begin with. All it was, all she felt, was pain. She silently cursed Matt with all of her heart as he fell asleep next to her. It was the first time they'd slept so close to each other since the beginning of their travels. Seina felt like her control had been taken away from her so quickly. So easily. Like it never meant anything at all.

When the fire had nearly gone out, she sat up and winced. The world outside of their fire's narrow radius was as dark as a mound of tar, and every bit as thick. She knew she didn't want to be here at the moment, but she had completely forgotten what direction they were headed.

It gradually dawned on her as she watched the remaining flames of their fire die out—why not take Matt up on his little offer early? All she would need is the radar, some food, and… would she dare…?

Slowly, Seina reached to press the light-up button on the cheap watch Matt had bought while it was still wrapped around his wrist. It was 12 AM. He usually woke up a little before dawn. If she left now, she could get a head-start of about 5 or 6 hours on him, and he would never be able to catch up. Not without that radar.

Far, far away, Seina heard the crack of thunder, and wondered if it was coming their way or going. While her partner snored, he took the back that lay at his feet, containing the radar and the two dragon balls. Her eyes closed, and for a moment—probably because of the relief of being able to get away so easily—Seina felt as though she might be able to fall asleep after all. A sharp pulse of agony between her thighs reminded her of exactly why that wasn't going to happen.

She'd put it off long enough. Now, it was time to go.

()()()

"Seina…?"

Matt woke up the next morning, and could judge by sun in the distance attempting to shine through a thick canopy of clouds that today would be one of those rare days where they would be forced to stand still. The idea of using a day to relax, charge their critically low batteries, talk about what they'd done last night—he liked it. Until he woke up and realized Seina was no longer at his side.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. "Seina?!" He called out a bit louder. What the hell would she be doing off by herself? What could she possibly hope to accomplish? If she went the way of the sun—to the East—she was going to run right into the storm that looked to be on its way. They didn't even have an umbrella between them. Matt felt a little stupid because of that—an umbrella should have been an obvious thing to pick up from a convenience store, but it wasn't, because of how vastly both of them underestimated the sheer size of the desert.

"Seina, where did you go?!" At this point, Matt stood up and cupped his hands over his mouth. First off, he had never woken up to find her not at the camp site. Second of all, the both of them agreed to always be within seeing and hearing distance of one another. If one of them got lost from the other, it would not only cost them time collectively, but if one of them was carrying food and/or water while the other one wasn't, someone might starve or go thirsty. No, this wasn't like Seina, to not be careful, not when she was always so much careful than he. She wouldn't just walk this far away to go to the bathroom or something.

A cold, cold thought came out of his brain and landed straight into the pit of his belly. Matt could almost hear the acid splashing the inner walls of his stomach. He picked up the knapsack where he kept his radar and the balls—the one he knew Seina had to have seen him using—and to his horror, there was only a single dragon ball inside.

"Wh… why…" he stuttered, tears filling his eyes. "Why take only one ball…? Seina?! WHY ONE BALL?!"

Matt proceeded to hastily tear open and pour out every bag Seina had left in her wake. The two of them had never started to take inventory, but he could tell there were certain food items that were missing. The straw broke when Matt looked at the wagon and found that there was only about half a gallon of drinking water left. She had taken a portion out of the second bottle, poured it into the first, and left with it.

He turned in a circle and found that he couldn't really remember the direction they were heading. When he was done turning, he collapsed in a heap on the ground and just screamed.


	8. Separation Anxiety

It was a bitterly cold morning during the month of… who could say, and laying in the middle of the desert between a freshly-started fire and a handful of supplies was Matt Stoneman.

He stopped counting after seven, the days that had gone by since he was left to die in the middle of nowhere by Seina. The betrayal had long since stopped stinging. He'd had plenty of time to reflect, and had come to a few conclusions. Maybe, when in the mood, he would bother to elucidate upon them.

()()()

Central Pfousy was abuzz with sounds Seina no longer thought of as magical. The sounds of party, play, and excitement were something she had nothing to compare to before she had entered this town. Now, she came to think of them as the sounds of falseness. An old man who Seina suspected was a bit of a pervert was allowing her to sleep a couple nights in his spare room above a modest café, and as she lay awake, the ghostly wails of police sirens and the shouting of drunk barely-adults filled the air and kept her company.

Pfousy was a college town, and it made up for not having very many people by making sure those few people were inebriated on a seemingly constant basis. For the last three days, Seina saw it as a miracle if she could get a conversation started with anybody who was making sense. She felt old here, even if she was younger than many of these people. Some of these places wouldn't let her in the door, because she didn't have an "ID" of any sort. It was fine with her, though—all she really cared about was one of these buildings.

It was a small restaurant with shoddy, dirty windows on the front and an "OPEN" light that always blinked frantically. The name of the place was "WALLACE CAFÉ," which was stenciled in big, bold letters on one of the windows. The font was unnervingly militaristic, like something Seina had once seen on the front cover of some bootleg movie from the mainland Simone showed her once.

She stood across the street from this restaurant and took a look at the radar. There was no mistaking it, even with the short time she had to learn how the radar worked: this place had the dragon ball in or under it. The other day, she snuck onto the roof via a staircase on the side of the building. There was no sign of the ball there, and she looked in every possible crevice. Now she had no choice but to go in here, to this place that intimidated her.

Every night she'd spent scoping out this place was a night she also spent wondering if this is even what she wanted to do. It wasn't too late to turn back, she told herself. She left Matt a dragon ball just so she could find him again in case she had to. According to the radar, Matt hadn't even moved from their last campsite. Unless he had, and left the dragon ball behind, which seemed greatly unlikely to her. This idea of hers—this complete longshot—would land her in trouble with Matt as likely as it would endear her to him, but she didn't care. This was about proving to Matt that he had no kind of control over her. He could stay out there in the desert, as far as she was concerned—this dragon ball would be her responsibility.

"Is there something I can help you with, ma'am?" A man in his 40s with a gruff voice asked, having just arrived at the same corner Seina happened to be standing on. "I can't help but notice the way you keep staring over at my restaurant."

"Oh! Actually," Seina said, putting on the same winning smile she employed back at her village all the time, "I think you might have something I'm interested in."

"What would that be, miss?"

Seina reached into her purse, the cheap one she'd bought with a chunk of Matt's money, and pulled out the dragon ball that caved in Simone's head. "Something that looks exactly like this."

The man's face faltered for a second, then he resumed smiling, but darkly. "Who told you I had that?"

"No one." Seina made sure to hide the radar in her purse as she reached her hand in to pull out the ball. "No one and nothing. This was just a complete coincidence."

It was so obvious she was lying, he felt like she was just being coy with him. In the dark, he was able to size her up without her even noticing. She looked gorgeous, but was also wearing very bland clothes. They contrasted against his cheap but nice-looking suit he wore for nights out. She clearly wasn't trying to look good, but she had a natural beauty that was nearly irresistible.

"Why don't you come with me," he said. "I'll show you the ball."

()()()

Matt was sitting Indian-style on his sleeping bag, thinking. The bitter air around him had stalled, and was no longer stabbing through him with every cold gust.

Matt stared down at his body. He had been of about average weight when he left Gasket. Now he was much thinner, and his skin, which was once so pale and unblemished it resembled porcelain, was stained and tanned. Even without a mirror, he knew his face had become rough and patched with intermittent facial hair. Never in his life had he been able to grow a passable beard and mustache, and that characteristic was going to hold true, he supposed, no matter how long he went without shaving. Oh, how he could think of so many, many uses for a razor right about now…

Was this the appropriate time to be thinking about suicide? In a matter of only a few months, he had lost everything. He had no idea how to get back to Gasket even if he wanted to. He didn't even know how to get to a city. He and Seina had been relying on the radar completely. They had no map—there was no map for this part of the land anyway. None that would help. He had a good run. The two of them together had managed to get a couple of the dragon balls before…

It was his fault. That was the best conclusion he could come to. In his sheer horniness, he had clouded and distorted his own judgment. She left because he gave her a reason to want revenge, and she got it. Matt had to almost admire how well she did it, too. She was probably planning to do what she did as soon as he managed to find the second dragon ball. She entertained his desire to take her virginity long enough to wait him out, then when he fell asleep, take his valuables and leave him with enough food and water to live on a few days so he could sit out here and figure out what a bastard he had been.

Sometimes, Matt had dreams, where he was in a big, white void, vaster and more terrible than this desert. In those dreams, Seina would appear to him as he sat down on the white floor. She wouldn't walk up; it was as if she simply faded in from whatever immaterial location she used to inhabit. Matt would ask her, "where's the ball?" Seina would just look down on him. "Seina, where's the radar?" Again, her face remained stony, and her eyes wouldn't even focus entirely on him sometimes. Rather, she would be looking straight ahead, and if Matt looked in that direction, he would always see nothing. The dream would end when he stood and tried to reach his hand out and touch her face. Just as his fingertips would start to make contact—contact he couldn't even feel—her lips would part slightly, then her jaw would unhinge like a snake, and she would belt out a violent, piercing scream that sent Matt crashing back into the waking world. Sometimes he just sat up for an hour straight, thinking about it.

When he was tired of the cold blandness, Matt curled back up underneath the bag and thought about his inevitable starvation. If it came to it, was there anything at this campsite that would be sharp enough to cut through him? Was there anything he could do except wait to die of thirst? "I don't want to waste away out here…" he mouthed to himself as he tried to hide his mouth between his two knees, folded up higher than his chest.

"What can I do?"

()()()

"Have a seat, Miss… uh, what was your name?"

"Oh, I never told you it. I'm Seina."

"Seina," said the old man, that somewhat nasty smile ever-present on his pink, drooping face, "I'm Thyme Vealo. I know, a food-y name like that, it's no wonder I ended up in this business."

Seina shrugged. "I'm sure you must think my name is weird. I don't like to pass judgment. Who is Wallace, though, if I may ask?"

"An ex-partner of mine, got the place named after him. He bolted three months later, but by then the name was stuck."

Mr. Vealo extended his hand, and Seina stared confusedly at it. "Do you shake hands where you're from?"

"Oh!" Seina grabbed his hand and shook a little too eagerly. "Sorry, I haven't had to do that very often."

"Quite alright, miss. So, what did you want to talk about regarding the ball?"

"I wanted to ask you what you were willing to trade for it," Seina explained. "See, a friend and I are looking around for them, and when we found out you have one of them, I agreed to, well, talk to you about selling it or trading as an option."

"I see. And you never did answer how you know about my ball, ma'am."

"It's just… something we sort of found out from a stranger. Uh… it was a guy, we were in a bar or something… and…"

Mr. Vealo leaned in a little closer from the opposite side of his desk. The office they were sitting in was this viciously bright stone room that looked less like a manager's office and more like a prison cell. The whole place smelled a little of cleaning chemicals and the desk Mr. Vealo had his hands clasped on top of was dark and raggedy, like a hand-me-down.

"…He, I… he told us that he saw you walking around with the dragon ball."

Mr. Vealo shook his head. "No. I had a friend of mine bring it over a few months ago. He said it looked really rare and valuable. Hasn't left this building."

Seina stared at Mr. Vealo like a deer caught in the headlights. "I'm sorry. He must have been talking about your friend. Maybe."

"Maybe," repeated the man, whose omnipresent smile had curved downward into a suspicious frown, the frown that had obviously been hiding behind his facetious smile this entire time. "But more to the point, my friend had the ball in a paper bag when he arrived. Never once did he take it out of that bag until he got here, to my office. I don't appreciate being lied to in my own fuckin' establishment, lady."

"My name's Seina," Seina snapped. "Did you already forget?"

"I wasn't listening in the first place," said Mr. Vealo. "I didn't bring you in here to be fuckin' negotiated with. I want to know exactly how you managed to get information on this fuckin' jewel. What did you call it? A dragon ball? What the fuck is that?"

"I don't have to tell you that."

Sighing and standing up, Mr. Vealo opened his desk drawer and pulled out a gun. Seina gasped as soon as she saw it. Immediately, she felt completely out of her depth—and completely out of Matt's depth. There was something almost comforting in the fact that, even if Matt had come here with her, the results would have been the same.

"Don't you think, as my guest, you owe me some kind of a fuckin' explanation?" said Mr. Vealo.

"Yes," Seina said breathlessly. "I'll tell you—I have a radar that detects the dragon balls. Look."

She pulled the radar out of her purse and turned it on, handing it to Mr. Vealo. "The blinking light in the center is the ball. The triangle is where the radar is."

Mr. Vealo looked at the device, turning it around to see the back. "Capsule Corp made this… now, that's interesting. I never heard of them releasing anything like this."

"Capsule Corp?"

"Yes, the multinational company I'm guessing you've never heard of because you're a fuckin' foreigner," said Mr. Vealo arrogantly as he placed the radar back on the desk. "Why the fuck would they make something that detects these things?"

"…The government."

"What?"

"The government got Capsule Corp to make it," Seina said, thinking quickly by remembering something she read off the back of a book once. "There's, uh, radiation inside of the dragon balls."

Mr. Vealo sat back down in his chair, putting his gun away. "Are you saying you're from the government?"

Seina thought about it. "Sure."

"Let's see a badge, or some kind of ID."

"I don't have it with me."

Seina looked at Thyme Vealo's face, and he looked even more intently at hers. He was constantly annoyed at this woman's attempts to hide away from the inevitable truth—she's working for one of his men, trying to betray him and take the so-called "dragon ball." He knew it was priceless to somebody, just looking at it he could tell it was lovingly made.

"You expect me to believe you're really from the fuckin' government?"

"You'll believe it when we come break down your door."

"Lot of tough talk for a lady who doesn't even have her gun with her. You know, just like I do, I could blow your fuckin' brains out right now."

Seina had to bite her tongue a little to stop from laughing, but it was becoming clear to her that she had this man almost believing her. She concocted this lie as a distraction until she could figure out a better one, but it looked like she could settle here. "If you do that," she said. "They'll know where to find me. They'll know I'm here."

"Fuck you, there's no 'they.'" But Mr. Vealo's voice was hinting at him suspecting otherwise.

"Just hand over the ball," said Seina. "Please. Don't make this end in violence."

Thyme Vealo let out a deep, deep sigh after a final silence session of thought. "Fine. Why don't we make a deal?"

Matt's face flashed in Seina's mind with a headache intensity. "What deal?"

()()()

With a scream, Matt jolted up in his sleeping bag, looking like a worm with its head poking out. Despite the weather's bitter chill, he had sweat running down his face.

It was very early morning, from what Matt could tell. Maybe it was early evening. Maybe he had completely lost track of days and nights. When he went to bed, it was day. Maybe he had slept for 24 hours.

His exhaustion dissipated when he looked out into the distance, where the sun was rising in the east, and he saw a small human shape illuminated by the sparse light of the morning sun. Was it the east? Maybe it was the west.

The closer the shape got to him, the more it felt like his dream. It was Seina, it had to be, but he didn't know for sure yet whether he'd actually woken up. This wasn't the White Zone. This was the desert, and all of his things were here. He still smelled a little of the fire he'd set the night before.

When Seina was close enough to Matt that he could identify her features, he got out of his bag. He stood, slouching, in front of the remains of his campfire and watched Seina like a hawk. It looked like she was wearing the same clothes as when she left him. Matt saw that she had a purse slung over one of her shoulders. He couldn't stop his mouth from acting out.

"Did you buy that with the money you stole from me?"

It was hard to tell if she had even heard him or not. She unzipped her purse when the two of them were an arms distance away from each other and handed him the radar out of it. As he took his radar back, she pulled out two dragon balls from her purse. Matt gaped in amazement at what she had managed to do without him in such a short amount of time. "That's three, Matt," said Seina. "That's almost half of the dragon balls. So complain about my purse now."

Matt looked her in the eyes. "Why did you leave me out here like this? I thought you weren't coming back. I would have died out here."

Seina walked up to Matt until their bodies were touching, and leaned in until their faces were an inch apart. Then, just as Matt's lips started to pucker, she moved her head over slightly to whisper into Matt's ear. "I don't need you."

With that, Seina began the process of dismantling their campsite, as Matt stood with a cold, contemplative expression, in the increasing light of day. After a moment, Matt reached out and touched Seina on the shoulder as she was rolling up her own sleeping bag. She turned and said, "what is it?"

"Nothing," Matt replied.

Seina sighed and shook her head. "Are you going to keep standing around and trying to start something between us again, or are you going to help out?"

"I was just making sure you weren't a dream again. I'm sorry."

"You dreamt about me?"

"…Yeah."

By afternoon, the two of them were back on the same path. Dragon ball number four was next.


	9. Pfousy Revisited

**Sorry about getting this posted later than the Saturday deadline, but that's actually what I'm here to talk about. See, my personal life is getting pretty hectic, especially money-wise, so I'm no longer going to guarantee a chapter once a week. From now on, I'm going to update as I can, which could mean two or three updates one week, then no updates the next week, or even two weeks. This is until I can get shit in my life straightened out in a way that works for me. Now, I still work on this story every day, so there's no reason to really worry, but this is just how it stands at the moment. Now, without further ado…**

()()()

"Oh, hey, dear."

Dr. Briefs shut the door of the work-room behind him. Bulma was sitting at a desk, fiddling with the new dragon radar. "Hey, Dad. Almost done with this thing. Did you need the lab or…?"

"No, not for anything very important. Mainly just wanted to have some privacy."

Bulma smiled a little. "We have bathrooms for that, you know."

"Oh, I know. I just don't want to be rushed out the first time someone knocks."

Dr. Briefs looked over Bulma's shoulder. He was close enough that his daughter could smell the smoke from his ever-present cigarette. "Goodness, you really are almost done. It took you a year to complete the first one."

"It didn't take a year!" Bulma said. "I had it in, like, six months!"

"That's not how I remember it."

"Well, it sounds like your age is catching up to you, Dad."

Dr. Briefs laughed heartily, sitting down at the other desk beside the door. "Your mother thinks I'm as sprightly as the first day we met."

"I didn't need to know that."

They laughed together for a little while, then Bulma went back to tinkering with the radar. As she started to put the finishing touches on it, her father asked, "so, how's that boy you've been going out with lately, that… Yamcha, was his name?"

Bulma tensed up. The hands that were diligently working on the dragon radar stiffened. "I haven't seen him in a couple of days. We sort of had a fight."

"Really?" Dr. Briefs stood up. He wasn't ignorant of the fact that he'd hit a nerve with his daughter—all the evidence he needed was the hunching of her shoulders at the mere mention of Yamcha's name. "Is there something you'd like to talk about?"

Bulma shook her head, but didn't say anything.

"Well, okay. But I think I'd be able to offer you some pretty good advice. I'm sure I've been a Yamcha to a few ladies in my time. Maybe I could give you some insight."

"Again. Didn't really need to hear that."

"Well—"

"Look," Bulma said, swiveling in her desk chair, "it's no big deal, but I just don't feel like talking about it. I've been able to not think about it by working on the new radar."

"Ah, so that's why you won't let me help you with that thing!"

"No—I mean, well, kinda."

"Say no more, my dear," said Dr. Briefs as he approached the door. "I'm going to give you some privacy, it seems you might need it more than I do. Anyway, I think it's been a while since anyone's checked on the pets. I'll see you at the dinner table?"

"Yeah. Thanks, daddy."

"No problem, dear." And with that, he left the room, leaving Bulma alone with her thoughts.

She leaned back in her chair and put her hands behind her head, as if she was being arrested. The texture of her hair told her she needed a shower, post-haste. Normally, she bathed every single day, but she skipped yesterday out of apathy and focused on completing the radar. Her father was right, whether she cared to admit it or not—the first radar took way more time than this one, and that was because she only worked on that one in her down time. But Goku dropping that one gave her something to do to keep her mind off of Yamcha.

But she couldn't shake the worry, in the back of her mind, that the dragon radar Goku dropped would fall into bad hands. After all they'd been through for those balls, they had seen too many people going after them—even succeeding in getting them—for an evil use. Her cold and scientific mind told her that it most likely broke on impact and would just be thrown away by whoever found it. But her nerves told her… she needed to finish the new radar. Fast.

()()()

"Capsule Corp," muttered Matt as he traced his finger around the logo embossed on the back of the radar. "I can't believe I didn't notice it earlier. Yeah, I know who they are."

"Who are they?"

"They're this, uh, corporation. They pretty much make everything. They have this technology that allows stuff like cars, planes, and even houses to be carried in these capsules no bigger than your thumb."

Seina was ahead of Matt as they walked, so he couldn't see her look of wonderment. "That's… possible?"

"If I hadn't been seeing it for myself all these years, I never would've believed it. Never once have I even used a capsulated car. Always driven pre-capsule era stuff."

Matt turned the radar over in his hand and stared at the face of it. The blinking dot indicating the location of the nearest dragon ball was farther away than any other ball had been before then. "We're going to be months along before we get to the next one, it seems. Why don't we, uh… stop at the next town, lay back for a while, maybe try to get some money rolling in?"

"Sounds fine, Matt."

But Seina's dismissive, distant voice led him to believe that it didn't. "What happened to you when you left?"

"Nothing," she said with a shrug.

"No, I mean it, because since you got back yesterday morning, it's like you've just… not really been here. If it's still because of what I did, my offer still stands. I'll let you take some food and money if you're ready to strike out on your own."

"No."

Matt waited for Seina to elaborate, but when it became clear that she wouldn't, it rubbed him the wrong way. "God damn it, Seina, I'm not putting up with this for the rest of the trip—"

"Look," she said, "if it makes you happy, I just don't feel like talking about it. Okay? I got the third dragon ball, I'm alive, and I came back for you. That's all you need to know. You don't get to decide what I do or don't do, so just—just drop it, okay?"

"…Okay. Fine."

The two of them walked in silence. Then, unexpectedly, Seina rebroke the mended silence. "The next town is called Pfousy, it's really noisy. If we're going to stay there, I'd like to get away from the college part of town."

"I guess you wouldn't be used to the noise of a college town?"

"Well, would you?"

"No. I guess not. The most noise I ever had to deal with in Gasket was when my neighbors would start airing their dirty laundry."

"Airing their dirty laundry?"

"Yeah, you know, fighting in public. They'd just go out on the lawn and… argue. Probably started out as a talk in the house."

Seina tried to think of an instance in her village where anything like that had ever happened. Sure, there were kids in the village who would get into dust-ups, but when those kids grew up, they usually did the same thing as everyone else; bottle up their grievances against each other and release it slowly as a vapor to any friend or family member who would listen.

"Weird."

()()()

Two hours later, Matt and Seina arrived in the town of Pfousy, starving and tired. They had 75 zenie left. "I know a guy," Seina told Matt as they arrived in town, "who let me stay in a room above his restaurant while I was here. If you don't mind the noise outside, we can see about staying. Until we have something else worked out, that is."

Matt thought about it. 75 zenie would be just enough to put two people up in a crappy hotel room for a night, but with nothing left over for food, which meant eating the worst dregs of the stuff they bought months ago. He thought about how foolish the two of them must've looked walking into town with armfuls of stuff meant mostly for camping. Of course, it wasn't his fault they no longer had a car…

"Yeah. We can try that," said Matt. "I wouldn't be surprised if he rejected us, though. He probably…"

Matt bit his tongue at that point. He was intending to tell Seina she was probably only welcome in his home because she was an attractive, albeit filthy, woman. But Matt had already hit his quota of arguing with his partner-in-crime for one day.

"I don't think so," said Seina. "I think the room he loaned me has enough room for two people. One of us would have to use the sleeping bag. Only one bed."

"How big is the bed?"

Seina turned to glare at Matt. He held his hands up defensively. "I didn't mean anything by that. Just asking."

"Twin-sized. Don't get any ideas."

"Okay. I'll use the sleeping bag, then, but only because you got us the last dragon ball."

()()()

Seina could tell something was different about the man's face as soon as she walked into the restaurant. At first, she thought she might have walked into the wrong establishment, so she took a close look around. No. This was the same place. But the man behind the wood bar no longer looked like he knew her. "Excuse me, Petra?"

Petra looked at her and nodded, but his face remained a slab of deep, casual cold, as if Seina was not just a stranger, but an unwelcome one. "Yes. What is it?"

Seina turned for a second to get Matt's view on the situation. He shrugged. "We need a room," he said. "Seina says she stayed at this place a little while ago. Do you have room for two?"

"No."

He sighed, realizing this was going to be way harder than Seina sold it as being. He wasn't even sure how much he wanted to stay at a place like this. The whole restaurant smelled of grease and wood shavings. It was dimly-lit and the wooden paneling was dark colored. The only lighting was provided by the windows outside and some small, lantern-like glass-covered bulbs hanging by chains from the low ceiling. Matt could have touched them by reaching his hand up. It could almost be described as dank. Matt walked closer until he was standing right behind the stools. "We have money. If that's your concern—"

"I don't have room for two people."

"Yes," Seina interrupted, "you do. We can make it work."

Petra slammed the glass he was cleaning onto the counter, nearly breaking it. "Is it true what I've heard about you, woman?"

Seina's eyebrows tightened. "What?"

"Did you burn down Wallace Café?"

Matt looked at Seina in disbelief. He tried to look for a sign in her body language that proved she had no idea what the man was talking about, and didn't find it. "Seina—"

"Never mind. If you're going to be that rude, I'll just leave. Come on, Matt."

But Matt stayed behind for a while, and Seina didn't seem to mind. He and the owner of the establishment stared each other down. "Did you know anything about what I said?" asked the owner.

"No," Matt said, sitting down. "What happened to this… what did you say, Walter Café?"

"Wallace," corrected Petra. "The place used to be owned by a friend of mine named Thyme."

"Time?"

"Like the spice. Someone committed arson on that building just a couple of days back. I still smell smoke when I walk past where it used to be."

"God damn. And you think she did this?"

"I know she did, because Thyme said so. There ain't enough evidence to pin it on her, of course. But I knew just from the way Thyme described her who it was. I never would have expected that kind of chick to go that far—I figured she might have been a prostitute, because of how shabby she looked when she came in. But arsonist?"

Matt stared at the countertop, thinking. He knew in his heart she had been hiding something from him ever since she got back from her lone excursion. Though they had been traveling together all these months, Matt felt he knew less about her than she knew about him. If her fiancée was capable of committing a murder, if necessary… wasn't Seina capable of burning someone's business down… if necessary?

()()()

When Matt left the café, Seina was on the corner nearest to the place. The moment they locked eyes, Matt ran over and grabbed her by the wrist before she could run. While Seina struggled against his fevered walking pace, Matt drug her to an alley separating two bars. Once deep enough in, he pinned her to a wall, placing each of his hands on either side of Seina's head.

"You _burned a fucking building down?_ " Matt whispered harshly into her face, close enough that Seina could smell his breath. She said nothing, because she couldn't decide which one of the many things that popped into her head should be let out. All at once, she felt anger, fear, disbelief—how could she possibly have expected one of Mr. Vealo's friends to be the same person who let her live in that upstairs room?

"Seina, answer me, god damn it. We're not moving from here until you tell me what happened, I don't want to hear any more of your excuses, no more _punting the fucking ball down the road, I need you to tell me what happened and I need you to tell me NOW!"_

Until the very last second, Seina's arms remained by her side, but in a flash one of them came up to Matt's face. The nails on her right hand burrowed deep enough into Matt's cheek to draw blood. He let out an undignified squeak, thinking he was about to lose one of his eyes, and he withdrew from Seina, pressing his back against the opposite building from where Seina stood, breathing heavily though she had physically done little.

"I burned down Thyme Vealo's building," said Seina through gasps. Matt felt his anger thin, realizing that Seina was breathing that way because she was anxious. It was clear from her eyes—tears were pooling around them, they were bloodshot, the pupils were shrunken. He had never seen her look afraid. Not like this. Even the Simone incident didn't put her in this shape.

Matt stepped forward gingerly, looking at his partner like a dangerous wild animal. "Why?"

Her face became pained. That was the one question she was hoping he wouldn't ask, but knew he would. "Same reason I left you."

"What?"

"You…"

"Wait—is this about… the bet? He did the same thing to you? And you…"

Seina's lip trembled. "And I what, Matt? I let him?"

"You let him."

She opened her mouth to talk, but nothing came out. The tears that were convalescing around her eyes began falling down her face. Slowly, her knees buckled beneath her, and she skidded her back down the side of the building on her side of the alley, sobs now flowing freely out of her mouth. Matt turned away, his head cradled in one of his hands, eyes staring up at the line of blue sky visible to him. A slightly sick turning feeling had awoken in his stomach. When was the last time he ate? Maybe last night? Certainly not this morning. Maybe that's why he was starting to feel so weak, so dizzy. He had to walk away from Seina. Her almost convulsive sobs were too much to listen to. They made it impossible to think.

He emerged from the alleyway and an acute awareness of the new danger of his surroundings overtook him. The face of every person around him took on a slightly suspicious tone. If the police had gotten involved already, he was now harboring a fugitive. There was now simply no way the two of them could stay in this place. Maybe, if he left Seina in the alley, hid her behind a trash can or something, he might use their last morsel of money to replenish their supplies so they could continue on to the closest other town, but not if she kept sobbing the way she was.

All that really made sense to him at the moment was to leave her behind. He felt imbued with a great sense of pride at how he had managed to make it this far and acquire three dragon balls from all over the world in what felt like a fairly short span of time… well, besides the one Seina got by herself while he was out in the desert contemplating his own death… and the first one from the village that she basically stole right out from under Simone and Chief's noses…

They were partners. He couldn't leave her behind like this.

But he couldn't protect her either. He walked back to the same café he had just left minutes ago—somehow it felt like hours—and peeked in to see if there was anyone in there who might overhear something they shouldn't. Not only were there no customers, Petra wasn't standing at the counter. Matt walked in and was about to take his seat at the counter when he heard the voice of Petra in the back. He sounded as if he was trying to keep quiet, but the words were audible:

"Yeah, she came in, just a few minutes ago, along with this skinny dude. Real dirty, had a high-pitched voice… almost like a kid, and he stank up the whole damn place. Might have to close down for the day… sure, yeah, your guys' guns are all here. But, Thyme, listen, they already left, so you need to get down here fast, and keep a lookout. The guy was wearing a plain white t-shirt and some shorts, just like the chick… okay, see you soon."

By the time Petra came back to the counter, Matt had gone.


	10. Field Trip

Seina sat on the ground in the alleyway, legs splayed. She was not crying anymore, because there almost didn't feel like enough water was left in her body with which to shed tears. Her head was turned to the sky, the bit that was visible between two closed bars. Never before had she felt quite so exhausted, quite so unable to get back up on her own two feet. The weight of all the time she had spent helping a man she only somewhat knew was keeping her planted firmly to the concrete. She knew if she told him, what would happen, and when he volunteered to stop asking about it, there was almost time for her to feel relief.

But then Petra ruined it, in one fell swoop. Why is it, in small towns, everyone has to know each other?

"Seina!"

Matt's voice, urgent and piercing as always, swept through the alley like a wave. She barely had time to turn her head in the direction of his voice when he bent down, grabbed her hand, and practically yanked her off the ground.

"Matt, what—get off of—"

"No time!" Matt yelled. "We have to get the hell out of town! Thyme—he's coming!"

Seina gasped. At seemingly the mere mention of the man's name, she seemed to freeze up. "What do you mean?"

Instead of answering, Matt started to run as best he could while dragging a hesitant Seina behind him.

"What about the stuff?!"

Matt stopped, looked behind Seina into the alley where she was sitting, and swore. Bags of their things were at the corner of the alley. "Just grab whatever we can't buy later, we have to leave!"

Neither of them would be able to recall later exactly how long and how far they ran—all they knew is that they had made it out of Central Pfousy and gotten back out into the wilderness before they decided to stop. Seina would never forget how they ran. The people around them already helped foster a mutual suspicion with their shiftiness and their unfriendliness. For a college town—Seina didn't even know that she'd ever actually seen the college—there weren't a lot of kids younger than them around, at least not at this time of the day. What was there for them, as they ran from something only one of them would even be able to recognize on sight, were a series of drawn-out looking people with equally drawn-out lives, stumbling through the chilly, clear winter, silently judging them as strangers.

"Okay," Matt choked out between gasps for air as the two of them sat in the dirt far enough outside of town that no one could see them, "okay. I think we're safe. Let me just, uh—"

A stone cold terror entered Matt's stomach. "Seina… did you grab the radar?"

Seina nodded, handing it to him. "I got the balls, too. You're welcome." That last part, she spat out like a worm.

"Okay," Matt said again, if for no other reason than to goad himself toward thinking he had a handle on the situation. He clicked the button on the top of the radar and saw that they had just run away from the direction of the next dragon ball. They ran north, when they should have gone west. However, it mattered little, since the ground they had just traversed was infinitesimally small compared to the distance between themselves and the next ball.

"We didn't spend any money in that town… so that's good, at least."

"I guess," Seina muttered. "Unless we can't find another one. Why haven't we just bought a roadmap yet?"

"Don't need one," Matt replied. "I don't want to slow down. The closer we collect all these dragon balls, the closer this trip of ours can come to ending. Then I can go home, and you can do whatever it is you feel you have to do. Find another guy who owns a café to shack up with, maybe?"

Matt didn't look up from his radar as he talked, so he didn't see—nor did he hear—Seina stand up and march over to him until her fist had already crashed into the side of his chin. He grunted and lost his footing, falling on his right arm. The radar fell out of his hand. He reached for it, only for Seina to step on his hand and grab it. She held it up high and looked down at Matt with the resolute stare of a vengeful god.

"Seina… you stupid bitch," Matt cried out, barely prying his hand out from under Seina's foot, "I was kidding!"

"No," she said. "You weren't. Now look. If you ever say anything about what I did to get that damn dragon ball to me ever again, I swear to god, I will leave. Promise me you won't, or I break the radar."

Matt made a motion to get off the ground. "Don't move," Seina ordered. "I will break this thing, I swear to God."

"Okay, okay, fine, fine," Matt said hastily. "You win. You already told me what I wanted to know. Now come on, put the radar down!"

"You promise?"

"…Yes. I promise. You win, I already told you."

Seina relaxed her arm, letting it drop naturally to her side. She turned away from Matt, still laying on the dirty ground. "I'm sorry to have to do that. But I'm not going to be your whipping girl. That's not what I left my village to do."

"Why did you leave your village?"

Matt was standing by now, bending down and brushing loose dust off of his knees.

"Why did you leave," he repeated, "when all you've done is come with me and… and live like this? I mean, why ARE we living like this?!"

Seina crossed her arms, continuing to look away. "Because it's your plan. No stops, no distractions, head straight for the next dragon ball until we're done. I had to beg you, Matt, to even think about stopping and getting some money."

"Money," laughed Matt, "as if anywhere in the world would want to hire us. How long as it been since you showered, anyway?"

"Three days ago, while I was staying at the café. What about you, crusty? Months?"

Matt opened his mouth to make a comment about Seina and the so-called "shower" she took at the café, but it didn't seem worth it in light of recent events. "Tired of arguing yet?" he asked instead.

"I could ask you the same thing."

()()()

 _The next day_

"I never realized," Matt breathed while he struggled to keep pace with Seina, who, as always, was walking ahead of him, "how hard it was to drift until I started."

"Same," said Seina. "I knew I'd have to do it one day, when I decided to leave home. It's hard."

Ahead of them and behind them were no more than long stretches of green. The desert ground began to fade into fertile soil last night as they passed by a town that had no more than a convenience store and two houses. Barely even worth stopping in. The name of the town, or rather the outpost, was Nosyrb, and Matt went into the store just to buy a map.

"It looks like the next town west of here is… Umbly," said Matt. "It's big enough to have two or three different roads branching out of it."

"Ugly?"

"No. Umbly."

Seina laughed a little. For some reason, that sound evaporated some of Matt's always-present anxieties. "Umbly. Who names these places, anyway?"

"If I had to guess, the people who founded them. Some guy named Umbly and another guy named Pfousy probably came across the same patches of land a long time ago."

"And Nosyrb?"

Matt shrugged. "I'd say a place like that is less founded and more just appears."

They stopped talking for a moment, then Seina spoke up with an excited voice, "Look! A road!"

Matt took his eyes away from the new road map and stared ahead. Indeed, an actual paved road lay horizontally not too far ahead of them. He looked both directions and saw nothing coming or going from whatever the road led to. He heard Seina running to it as if it were a landmark while Matt once again, with a near-religious fervor, consulted the map. This was something he was beginning to feel like he should have done before even starting the trip.

"Let's see… here's Nosyrb, and we've been traveling west… yeah, if we go down this road that way," he pointed right, though Seina wasn't looking, "it'll curve into Umbly. Checks out."

"I've never seen a road by itself before," Seina said lightly. Matt wondered how this was the same woman who overpowered him the day before, and if so, how. "It's like… everything around it is so… normal, but right in the middle is this… road. This strip of hardness cutting the grass in half."

"Are you okay, Seina?" Matt asked. "Is this a new poem you're working on?"

Seina looked away from the road. "Just tired, I guess. Let's go."

()()()

Within two hours, they were at Umbly.

The place seemed to have a wall around it at first, but what looked like a wall far away became plentiful rows of smokestacks upon closer inspection. The air around Matt and Seina felt like it was turning to syrup. Umbly was the kind of place one could barely breathe through their mouth in without dissolving into a fit of hacking coughs. The sensation was akin to a couple of foul-tasting fingers from a dirty stranger being suddenly and coarsely stuck down one's throat to attempt to induce a vomiting effect, but settling for attempted collapse of the lungs.

"Matt…" Seina said in a near-whimper. "Matt, I'm going to be sick. I think—"

Matt, who had been walking ahead, heard both the clutter of Seina dropping her things and the retching sounds she made as the pollution hit her. He himself was struggling quite a bit, his hometown and other places he'd traveled to so far having been relatively clean in comparison, but for the first time in a long while, he was forced to think about Seina's situation as an outsider to the rest of the world. Anything she knew about the world Matt lived in, she learned either from asking him questions or from whatever she had read and heard as she languished in her village.

On his cracked, yellow, weathered face, a sanguine sort of expression took presence, like a muted Grinch. He thought about how weak she really was. Nothing more than a strange foreigner with sacks in her hands, believing that nothing of her surroundings was interconnected. And yet, she stamped on his hand when he tried to reach for HIS radar, the one HE found, the one that HE had the rights to. She dared to throw her fist at the man singularly responsible for pulling her out of a backwards, backwater town and into this world, this civilization she wanted all along, only to her to find out she couldn't handle breathing it in.

"How far into town do you think we'll need to go," asked Matt casually, "to stay at a decent hotel?"

He couldn't see her face twist into an expression of horror and disbelief, because his eyes had come to rest on the top of a billowing smokestack that towered just over the others, excreting a yellow, sticky fog into the empty blue. "You're joking?" she asked in a ragged voice that sounded like she had already been living here for a decade.

"No." Matt turned away to look at her, and regretted it instantly. She actually had vomited, and it wasn't more fun to look at than the smoke. But he was already there. Time to make a sale. "Seina, I know the place isn't very attractive. It's not supposed to be. All this time, you've been saying we need to make money, we need to prepare for the rest of the trip. Well, guess what? Places like this—look up, Seina—places like this," and he swept his arm to indicate the wide wall of factories that made up the titanic industrial sector of East Umbly, "are perfect. They hire people who have no ID, so you can work in them, too!"

"Work in one of those?!" Seina exclaimed. "Matt, I can't even—I'll die if I go in there!"

"No," Matt said soothingly, reassuringly, "no, Seina, I promise you won't. These places—they're full of people who—why, they've worked there for thirty years and don't even cough anymore." Matt began to worry that he was sounding too much like a story-telling grandpa, so he toned it back down. "We'll be fine. They have masks you can wear over your nose and mouth until you can get used to the stench." He didn't know that with any certainty, but he thought it was just probable enough, he could sound like he really believed it.

Seina finally stood up, her hands shaky. She opened her mouth, coughed a little, then spoke: "Where's the next nearest town?"

"Seina, come on."

"I just want to know!"

"Seina—"

"PLEASE, Matt, please, tell me."

Matt shook his head, gave a deeply frustrated exhalation, and pulled the map out of his back-left shorts pocket. "Fine. Look, Seina," Matt said, walking right up to Seina and pointing out Umbly on the map. "Right here, where we are, we're surrounded by nothing but these little hovels. I bet they only have a thousand people between them, at best. You really think we're going to find shelter and work opportunities in places like that?"

"Right now," Seina said, putting her hand on her forehead, her guts a turmoil of vicious wrenching, "I just want fresh air." Her vision danced as she lost control of her body. The last thing she heard, right before she hit the ground, was Matt calling her name from what felt like a million miles away.

()()()

When she woke up, she was in the backseat of a car with a somewhat dusty velvet interior. At first, she thought she was somehow alone. When she tried to sit up, two hands gripped her shoulders and gently held her down.

"Ma'am, it's alright," said a gruff voice from the front seat of the car. "Everything's alright."

"Matt? You're not Matt, where is he—"

"Just relax, Seina." His voice from right above her. She became acutely aware at that moment that her head was rested on Matt's thigh. Again, she tried to sit up. "Please, Seina, just chill out. Rest."

"Chill out?!" Seina exclaimed, coughing a little. "Get your leg off me!"

The stranger poked his head into the backseat. "You can let her sit up, dude, she's alright."

Matt took his hands away from Seina's shoulders, glaring daggers into the driver's shoulders as soon as he turned his head. They were on the road into the city. He had just come passing by when Seina passed out. "So, this your first time at Umbry, little lady?"

"Yes. It's awful."

The man laughed heartily. Matt felt his blood getting hot. "Yeah, they all say that. And they ain't wrong. Place always stinks!"

"Really?"

"Hell yeah! I tell you, I've lived here my whole fu—flipping life, sorry, I almost cussed in front of you, ma'am. Lived here my whole life, and I still smell crap everywhere I go!"

"God, it's bad," said Seina, in the same enraptured tone she was using earlier to describe the road she and Matt found. "I couldn't breathe."

The stranger seemed pensive after a brief pause. "You know, you could be allergic to these fumes."

Matt clenched his teeth, swallowing the many, many words he now wanted to say back down into his stomach as if he were choking back his own throw-up. "Allergic?"

"Yeah. Can't stand the stuff, makes you break out, your throat close up. I worked in factories where new guys would show up one day and by the end of the day, god damn, they'd look like they got caught in a beehive. Lumps all o'er 'em!"

"Matt," Seina said, "I think he's right. I think I—I wasn't breathing when—it just…"

Matt had never seen Seina at just a loss for words. It was even stranger considering, thanks to the asshole driving the car, she had plenty of new ways to describe how she didn't want to stop here. He could have shot the driver for spilling his guts out. If he had just shut his mouth and given them a ride, Seina could have gotten used to all this. Or not—honestly, Matt could've gone with either one. Every time he thought about Seina striking him… humiliating him… in the desert outskirts of Pfousy, it was like opening up an old wound that had just recently scabbed over.

"What do you think, man?" asked the driver. "If she's allergic, I can drop y'all off in another town. I'm off today."

"Really?" Matt and Seina asked at the same time, then Seina added, "you'd do that for us?"

"Yeah, it's alright. Been doing good on money lately. I think I can spare a little gas. Next town's only thirty minutes from here. It's an alright place."

"We need somewhere to work," Matt said. "We need a lot of options. Does this town have that?"

"Well…" the driver said slowly. "If a bigger place is what you're lookin' for, the next good-sized town's about an hour away."

"You don't have to drive us all the way there," Seina said. "Take us to the small place, and we'll walk the rest."

"Walk 25 miles, are you crazy?! No, I can't let y'all do that. Look—"

"We'll pay you back," said Matt. "For whatever gas you use. I'll come back myself and pay you."

"You two are homeless," said the driver. "I'm not gonna do that. It's alright. I'll think of this as a field trip. There is a pretty nice record store in West City anyway."

()()()

Meanwhile, 55 miles away in West City, Dr. Briefs and wife were watching some disturbing news on television.

"… _claims it was because of a strange orange keepsake a friend gave him."_

"BULMA!" Dr. Briefs shouted loudly as he could. "You need to see this, immediately!"

"What, Dad?" Bulma asked, wearing nothing but the robe she had put on after a long, thoughtful shower. Instead of speaking, the doctor pointed at the television.

"… _Yes, I believe this ball is why my restaurant was attacked. This woman called herself a police agent, but she was just some street punk, you could tell by her clothes."_

" _And could you describe it for us, Mr. Vealo?"_

" _I sure can. It's this orange ball, like the size of a baseball, but made of crystal or something. It has these orange stars—two of them—inside, and they're a darker color… you know, weird thing is, she said she was collecting them because they had radiation in them. I knew that was a lie, though. But she did have a radar with her, something Capsule Corp. made."_

The doctor looked over to see Bulma's reaction. She had her hand over her mouth, her eyes were the size of dinner plates. She remained frozen in that position until the very end of the story.

" _This has been Daniel Gilometh, reporting from the city of Pfousy."_

"Pfousy?" Mrs. Briefs said, confused. "Isn't that where we wanted to send Bulma for school?"

"We thought about it," Dr. Briefs said. "But the place was too damn sleazy when we went to visit it, so—"

"It's happening again…" Bulma almost whispered. "Someone's trying to collect the dragon balls, and… they have to be doing it with the radar Goku dropped…"


	11. The Capsule Corp Caper Part 1

"Here we are," the driver—whose name he revealed to be Terrence—declared as they pulled into the gas station. "Beautiful West City! Home of Capsule Corp. and my favorite record store!"

"It's definitely big," agreed Seina, enthralled and somewhat scared by how they had driven through the city for 15 solid minutes, and it never seemed even close to ending. "How many people live here?"

"A few hundred thousand," Matt answered. "Maybe even more."

"So," said Terrence, "I'm gonna go ahead and buy some gas and leave y'all two to your doin's. Is there anything else y'all can think of before I head on back to Umbry?"

Matt thought for a second, sharing brief eye contact with Seina long enough to get a feel of what she was thinking, then shook his head. "No."

"Well, alrighty. Y'all are free to get out of the backseat, stretch those legs. I'll pop the trunk for you, so you can grab your things."

Terrence pressed a button on his keyless entry and walked into the convenience store to prepay. As soon as he was in the store, Matt hopped out of the backseat and opened the trunk, rummaging through his and Seina's things for any sign that something was missing.

"Seina, I need a hand back here, okay?"

"Okay. But—wait, why?"

"Just come on! We need to unload our stuff, remember?"

Seina stepped out of the car and could tell, right away, that Matt was just looking through all the bags instead of unpacking the trunk. "Matt, you can't be serious."

"What?" Matt asked, not looking up from the bags, almost satisfied that everything was still there.

"He didn't steal anything from us, Matt. Come on, let's go."

"I wasn't watching him when he was putting all our stuff in here," said Matt. "I was too busy looking after you in his backseat. So, if he stole one of the dragon balls, or our radar—he didn't, they're in here—but if he had, now would be the time to get him to fess up. While he's in public."

Seina took a deep breath and chose not to argue the point further. But this was a turn in Matt—this paranoia and unwillingness to trust any strangers—that she hoped wouldn't continue.

"Hey!"

Matt and Seina turned to see Terrence power-walking out of the convenience store, holding in his raised hand what appeared to be a brochure. "I have something that I think y'all might be interested in!"

"Yeah?" Matt said. "What's that?"

Terrence handed Matt the pamphlet. It was advertising for an apartment complex in the area that was doing a special—a signing bonus of 200 zenie for anyone that came in any time within the last week of the month to sign a lease. The caveat, of course, being hidden in the fine print that one would be expected to pay the 300-zenie security deposit up front.

"We can't afford that," said Matt. "We just can't."

"I know," said Terrence. "Not without my help. Look, if I pay y'all's security deposit, you can both use the 200 dollars to live on until you get moved in to the apartment. In the meantime, look for a job, get back on y'all's feet—you could be living like normal people in a few weeks!"

Matt and Seina looked at each other, both of them amazed at Terrence's continued generosity, but only one of them showing it in their face. Matt turned back to Terrence and folded the pamphlet up, stuffing it in his back pocket. He began to think out loud. "Why don't you just give us the three hundred dollars straight up, if the whole point is to give us money?"

"All my money's on a card," said Terrence. "I don't use cash, don't even like carrying it."

"You ever hear of an ATM?"

"Of course, don't be silly."

Matt continued to face away from Terrence as he talked. "If Seina and I, as separate people, ever decided to rent an apartment, wouldn't signing the lease for one and never moving in just ruin our, uh… I don't know, credit, reputation, something?"

"Okay, fine," said Terrence. "You don't want to do it. But we'll have to go our separate ways, then."

Matt turned, astonished. His eyes tightened at the sight of Terrence's completely changed expression. It seemed that his joviality was sloughing off in favor of deviousness. "What is this?" Matt asked. "We either put ourselves at risk of being charged with robbery or we go with nothing?"

"I'm afraid so," Terrence replied. "I want to help, but I need a little leverage, first."

()()()

Once again, Chi-Chi found herself in the familiar position of having to stand at the front door and call out her husband's name. "Goku! Phone call!"

She waited for an answer, and when five seconds elapsed, she tried again. To no avail, because Goku had taken himself and his son well out of earshot, apparently.

Chi-Chi walked back to the phone and picked it up. "Sorry, Bulma, he's not here."

"That's fine, Chi-Chi, I just need to drop off the new dragon radar. I'm coming over."

"Coming over?! This place is a mess, I just got through with breakfast—"

"Chi-Chi, someone's collecting the dragon balls."

Chi-Chi pulled the phone away from her face for a moment and stared at it like it had just turned into a worm. "Are you sure?"

"There was a story on the news last night, some lunatic woman tried to burn a restaurant or something down over it. Whoever this is—whoever they are—they need to be stopped before they finish."

"Bulma, my son has one of those balls on his hat," Chi-Chi said, trying to calm herself just as much as she was trying to calm the woman on the other end of the phone who was in a near panic. "Goku and I never let him out of our sight. We'll be fine."

"But there's—" Bulma paused, all of the adventures—and the dangers—she and Goku had and dealt with together flashing before her eyes. Pilaf, the Red Ribbon Army, King Piccolo… all after the dragon balls, all willing to kill for them. "There's more someone can do than beat you in a fight. They could burn your house down while you're sleeping, they could take hostages and force you to give it up, they could… Chi-Chi, I just think sometimes people are more dangerous when they're smart than when they're strong, and… what if they're it?"

"We're safe, Bulma," said Chi-Chi. "I promise. But if you want to come over and drop the radar off, just try to wait until a little later in the day, would you? I still have some things to do around here."

A brief quietness on the other end of the line. "Okay. I'll see you in a few hours."

()()()

"Are you sure this is what you're interested in?"

"Yes."

A red-skinned elderly man behind a mahogany desk swept the papers across to Matt. "Okay, then. Sign here, initial here…"

In a matter of minutes, Matt was now the proud renter of an apartment not too far from the high school, perfect for his wife and children. And the best part of it, besides the nice carpet and the granite countertops, not to mention the electric bill already paid, was that he got in on the last day of a 200-zenie signing bonus, which would be given immediately upon signing. Matt would, of course, be expected to pay 300 zenie as a security deposit before he could receive any money, which the driver who brought himself and Seina here was happy to supply, on the grounds that they paid it back to him when they could. But in actuality, he had no intention whatsoever of sticking around. This was only part one of a plan he'd worked on since he and Seina arrived in West City yesterday.

"Here you are, young man," the red-faced landlord said jovially, handing him the money. "Your move-in date is two months from now, the deposit's already in. I think you're going to like it here, I really do. Do you have any more questions?"

"Just one. I have a friend who might be interested in getting a place up here as well. How would her chances be right now if she came in? Are there any more slots available?"

"Hm…" the landlord typed a little into the rickety computer on his desk. "It looks like we might have a studio apartment, if she's interested in a place by herself."

"Does that fall under the 200-zenie deal?"

"Uh, no. That's only for two bedroom places."

"Okay," said Matt, getting up to leave. "I'll let her know that. Thank you."

()()()

Chi-Chi didn't have to wait for Bulma to knock on her door. She knew she was there when she heard the roar of the small Capsule Corp. helicopter not far from the house. Goku and Gohan had still yet to arrive.

"Hey, Bulma!" Chi-Chi opened the front door and called out to the gray helicopter twenty feet away from the front yard.

"Chi-Chi," Bulma, exiting the helicopter, called out in response, "did Goku ever make it back?"

"Not yet," Chi-Chi said loudly over the dull roar of the helicopter's engine, still in the middle of coming to a halt. "You're welcome to stay a little while if you want to wait for him."

"I think I will," said Bulma. "I need to explain the situation for him. Where do you think he is?"

"Oh, I couldn't tell you, he takes Gohan out miles away from home sometimes. He won't even come back before nightfall, I bet."

"Well," Bulma said, "I hope it doesn't take that long. I told my parents to stay safe, try not to leave the house or anything."

"Why?"

"Well," said Bulma, "the dragon radar Goku dropped has 'Capsule Corp.' embossed on the back of it, so I'm worried the person, or people, looking for the dragon balls are going to find Capsule Corp. and try something. I think I'm just being paranoid."

"Didn't you say—oh, how rude, come in, please."

Bulma and Chi-Chi walked into the latter's house together, and Bulma was pleasantly surprised at the actual cleanliness of the house. Knowing that none other than Goku lived here, she expected the place to be a complete wreck. Chi-Chi was apparently a much better housekeeper than her privileged upbringing may have led her to believe.

"Is it hard to keep clean around here?" asked Bulma.

"Yes," Chi-Chi said immediately. "Between Goku and Gohan, I can hardly even keep up."

"I can imagine," said Bulma. "My parents and all the pets they have in the building, it's like, I don't even know if the place doesn't reek anymore or if I just got used to it."

Chi-Chi shook her head and smiled a little, out of politeness. Bulma always found Chi-Chi to be strange, hard company to keep. She was nice—most of the time—but was stoic and humorless as well. She had really been hoping that Goku would be back by the time she arrived here. Her and Chi-Chi had very little to relate to each other with besides Goku, and his was already a topic they covered before.

"How are your parents?" asked Chi-Chi. "Are they as worried as you are?"

"Those two," Bulma sighed. "They just don't get worried about anything. It's like they don't even care."

"Huh," shrugged Chi-Chi, opening the refrigerator. "That's weird. I mean, if the dragon radar says 'Capsule Corp.' and they live at Capsule Corp…"

"I know, right?! But no, they don't even want to increase security! 'We've never had a break-in,' Dad tells me, like that even means anything. Guh!"

The kitchen fell silent again. Chi-Chi made tea, and they sat together and drank, unsure of what to say to each other.

"Does the dragon radar you brought with you-?" Chi-Chi stopped herself. "Never mind, that's a dumb question."

"What?"

"What I was asking. You wouldn't bring the radar if it didn't work."

Bulma stood. "Oh! Thank you for reminding me!" She reached into her bag and pulled the radar out. "See, I finished it just before I took off to come here, and it's been calibrating since I landed. I think it might just now..."

She tapped the button on top. As she expected, there were three dragon balls clustered together in one area, very close to the fourth dragon ball. She tapped the button again to get closer.

"No…" Bulma said, shuddering. Chi-Chi saw her beginning to shake and put her tea down. "What is it? Is it broken?"

"I hope so." Bulma said. The dot on her radar was roughly west-to-northwest of where she was, and given that every square on the grid was supposed to be about five miles on this setting…

"They're in West City!" Bulma nearly shrieked. "They're—they're right there! I have to go!"

()()()

"This was a bad idea," Seina said as she walked out of the leasing office with her money. Matt stood by the door, and the both of them began to powerwalk away from the apartment complex.

"No," Matt said. "Terrence thinks we're going to stay around in West City, that's why he let us use his card. He thinks he can come back up here and shake us down for the money we owe him, but what he doesn't know is that we're gone after today. The cops aren't going to look too far outside of West City for a couple of twenty-somethings who faked signing a lease for some quick money."

"That's not what I meant," Seina said evenly. "There are more important things to think about than how smart something is. What difference does it make if something's smart if it isn't… right? If it's a bad thing to do?"

"Are you trying to say the both of us should even care about that anymore?" Matt snapped back. "Are you serious? I've killed a man and you burned down a café! What—"

"Shh!" Seina demanded, clapping her hand over Matt's mouth almost hard enough to be called a slap. "We're in public, you idiot!"

Matt grabbed Seina's hand and pulled it away. "What? If we're going to start trying to do the right thing all the time, maybe we should talk about it in public! Maybe we should let ourselves get caught! We might as well, if we're not going to do anything else that's 'wrong,' after all."

"It's not about the law!" Seina almost yelled. "We took advantage of Terrence and all those people for—"

Matt grabbed Seina's wrist again, this time pulling her toward a nearby convenience store. Ignoring the bewildered attendant, he walked the two of them into the restroom in the back. Once the door was shut behind them, Matt said:

"We are killers, Seina!" She flinched away from the word "killer" as if Matt had just spit a bug into her face. "We are arsonists! We are criminals! Both of us are guilty of harboring a fugitive as a goddamn hiking partner!"

Matt took his hands from Seina's shoulders and backed away slightly. "And I've accepted that. We both had good reasons for what we did. Simone, he… he needed to die! He would've killed you, and probably me, too. And the guy, whose café you burned down, he deserved it! And it was in the heat of the moment! No one could… no one could blame you. Right?"

Seina looked away from him, having chosen a particular part of the room to focus on so she wouldn't have to stare him in the eyes, in case he was able to tell she wasn't being honest. "Right," she said, staring down at the slot between the door and the floor.

"Okay. So, we don't need to feel guilty about taking advantage of some random guy we met. We're pursuing a much more noble goal, right? This isn't all for nothing, right? Or—it's not all for ourselves. Seina… we have to believe in what we are doing. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay." But Matt felt like it wasn't. And he felt like it wasn't over.

()()()

"Come on…" Bulma said out loud in the cockpit of her personal plane. She was almost halfway back to her home by this point, and her parents seemed to be outside or something, because they weren't answering her phone calls. "Mom! Dad! Answer the phone!" she yelled uselessly.

All of the things she and her family were going to need to do for the next few days were swimming around in her head. They were going to have to start actually locking up now. Coasting on the reputation of knowing the top martial artist in the world, who saved the world twice from the monstrous Piccolo, was no longer good enough. Not for a group of people hunting the dragon balls. There is no level of depravity a person or group wouldn't sink to just for a wish from the eternal dragon. They would have to hire armed security just to feel safe in their own home for the next several weeks or months, however long it took for the threat to subside.

"Damn it!" Bulma exclaimed as the phone built into her plane went straight to voicemail for the third time.

()()()

"Rob Capsule Corp.?"

"That's right."

Seina and Matt stood two blocks away from the dome of the Capsule Corp building, staring at it from afar. "If we do this," Matt said, "we can be out of this town with four dragon balls and enough money to live on the rest of the trip. It wouldn't even affect them that much. Do you have any idea how much money these people have?"

"Matt," said Seina, "I don't want to. We—we've done enough."

"It's just a robbery, Seina. Buy a couple of guns, get in, get out."

"…I don't know, Matt. I guess."


	12. The Capsule Corp Caper Part 2

"Perfect."

Seina watched as Matt finished securing their dragon ball bag to the inside face of a manhole cover with nothing more than a very tight knot. Part of the white thread he had used to do it with was clearly visible. "This isn't going to work," said Seina. "It's too easy for someone to find the balls by complete accident this way."

"I know," Matt said. "We aren't both going to leave them. Seina, I need you to hang out around here while I go and get us some supplies for the 'job.'"

"May I ask why you aren't just taking the balls with you?"

"Because whoever made the first radar probably has a second one. If we take them with us, they might track us down and, who knows, they might be armed. We need to do this intelligently."

"What am I supposed to do, then, if this person or these people show up while you're gone?"

Matt groaned. "God, Seina, I don't know, just distract them somehow. Tell them you're managing some kind of construction project and they can't open the sewer hole, figure it out."

"These people will probably shoot me."

"People who are involved with the owners of a major company gunning down an innocent foreign woman in the street in broad daylight over an orange keepsake," Matt said dully, "I can think of better ways to get publicity. There isn't going to be a gunfight over this, Seina. If you really think there will be, scream for help. Someone'll come running."

Seina crossed her arms. "And you know this how?"

"Because you're pretty," said Matt. "If you were ugly, I'd probably be making you go and get the guns."

With that, Matt left. Seina, who felt a little bit more used than complimented, nevertheless did what Matt told her, standing loyally by the manhole cover where he had tied the dragon balls. She never exactly pictured herself the type of person to wind up on guard duty, especially for some things that meant everything like these balls. She found herself incapable of even comprehending the consequences if Matt came back and found out that the balls had been stolen. The closest she could come to conjuring an image in her mind that felt accurate and on-point was the morning that she found him in the desert after the arson incident. How sullen, how sunken he looked, like he wasn't sleeping so much as shutting down at night, like he wasn't eating so much as grazing. Like she had single-handedly taken his entire purpose of living away. She didn't have to be told—she knew that he was dying out there before she returned.

What was he going to do when this was all over? When—if—they actually got the dragon balls and got the wish. Matt had nothing else left to do—nothing, that is, except go back to his same old dead end town and dead end people who probably wouldn't be happy to see him even if he did come wandering in with the alive little girl running ahead of them. Instead of thinking he was a murderer, they were probably going to think he was either a kidnapper of another child or some kind of warlock. Of all the things Matt had an easy time picking up on, it never ceased to amaze Seina that the one talent he was incapable of picking up on was the ability to read others.

()()()

"And you have four-hundred zenie?"

"Yes."

"Alright. Two guns for 400 zenie means that I could probably get you…"

The bald, bearded man behind the counter rummaged through some stuff beneath his counter until he pulled out two guns that looked like revolvers out of some old Western, aged realistically.

"They… work?" asked Matt.

"Yep," said the clerk. "They might be old, but trust me, I take these out once a week to make sure they're functionin'. Now, we're a pretty generous place, so we like to include a free full clip with every purchase—in your case, you'd get six bullets for both of these guns—but beyond that, were you interested in any kind of ammo?"

"No," said Matt right away. "Uh, not at all. I think I can get by with just that many bullets."

"Good," the clerk said. "That'll be about 375 zenie."

Matt stared at the clerk. "Really? Just like that?"

"Yep."

"I can just leave here… with the guns?"

"Yes, sir."

"…Okay."

Matt took the two guns and turned to walk away, when it occurred to him that there was more business the two of them could do together. A thought that had been stewing in his brain for a pretty long time surfaced itself finally—what if he could just go on ahead and keep looking? What if the dragon balls were not the only things out there he could look for? What if the world was full of things just like this, these mystical objects with strange powers?

"Say," said Matt as he was partly toward the door, "I was wondering. Do you sell in bulk?"

()()()

"Mom! Dad!"

Bulma landed her plane in her parents' backyard just in time to see the two of them walk out to do whatever menial things they would usually do at this time of day. "Oh, hi dear!" Mrs. Briefs called out, waving. "How was your visit to Chi-Chi's?"

"Guys, what are you doing?!" Bulma yelled, climbing out of the plane while the propellers were still moving. "Didn't you get any of my messages?!"

"No, dear, why?"

"The arsonist—arsonists, whatever it is—they're here! According to the radar—"

Bulma pulled out the dragon radar and clicked the button. Then she clicked it again. Then again. And every time, the radar showed that the balls were right up next to them, so close they could strike at any moment. Shaking, Bulma pressed the button on the top of the radar one more time. She zoomed in far enough to determine that the ball-holders were within a few scant blocks of her, being completely still.

"My God!" Dr. Briefs exclaimed right over Bulma's shoulder, nearly causing her to jump out of her skin. "Are those three dragon balls right by us?!"

"Yes!" Bulma replied. "Yes, that's what I've been trying to tell you and Mom all this time! You both need to get inside and lock the doors now!"

The two parents turned to do just that, but as Mrs. Briefs ran through the door, the doctor stopped right at the doorway. "What about you? What are you going to do?"

Bulma's jaw locked. The events of the last hour had been going at such a frightening speed, she hadn't had time to process or come up with any kind of plan. But then, when had she ever had to? Ever since she met Goku on that fateful day when she crashed her car searching for these damn dragon balls, all she had ever done was sit quietly by, for the most part, as Goku ran through everything with his brute strength. Even when it came to the Red Ribbon Army, a massive world-wide criminal organization with enough resources and intelligentsia to take on even the most dangerous foes, Goku was able to simply steamroll through.

Pilaf. General Blue. King Piccolo. Piccolo Jr. All of these foes had her and the rest of the group on the brink of utter destruction before, but all of them were defeated. Bested. And in hindsight, it seemed so goddamn easy.

"I'll tell you," said Bulma. "I'm going to go get the fourth ball. I'm going to get to it before they do. "

()()()

Seina didn't realize she was pacing until she turned one of the times to see a blue-haired woman walking across the street, leaving the Capsule Corp. building. She was barely able to discern any other sort of features, but the blue hair was obvious all the way from several blocks out. For some reason, the blue hair struck Seina as very, very familiar. She had a sudden urge to try and get ahold of Matt, but there was no way to do that… unless she could borrow someone's cellphone.

Wait. Matt didn't have one of those. Shit.

The sun was starting to get a little dimmer. Or maybe that was just her imagination. She was starting to wish she had gotten something to drink when she and Matt went into that convenience store.

()()()

"Let's see…" Bulma said quietly. "I really hope it's not just buried around here somewhere. Or—I really hope someone else doesn't already have it."

Matt peered out from behind a tree. It was sunset, and they were in the park together, though only one of them knew it. She was exactly where she needed to be. One good shot is all it would take. He'd grab the ball and—

…Of course he wouldn't do that. Because there was still a heist to do. Why not do both? He was here—he brought himself and Seina here—for both the ball and the money.

Matt took a second to marvel at the young woman as she made her way slowly to the dragon ball's location. She was absolutely beautiful, so much so that Matt found it hard to believe she was the one who got her elbows greasy or her hands dirty building the two of these contraptions. But she seemed to be able to wield that thing like a natural. And the more he thought about it, the more he had seen her around before. He had seen her on magazines, on the front cover of a newspaper, on a television special. She was going to be a CEO of perhaps the most major corporate entity on the face of the earth at an age most people might graduate from college or have their first child at.

Here and now would be a bad time, Matt decided as he shifted his eyes around, on the lookout for any sign of security for the young girl. He continued to picture tall men in black suits long after the point where it made any sense in his mind. Why would a group of security guards want to make themselves so obvious, anyway? The cliché men in suits would stick out like sore thumbs. Sure, they'd make a nice deterrent for less intelligent mammals, but anyone with an education would be able to infer that she had security following her everywhere no matter what, so it would seem pertinent to be hidden so that it's harder to elude them.

"It IS buried!" exclaimed Bulma. "Great. Now I have to get all the way back to the house to get a damn shovel. UGH!"

Disbelief grew heavier and heavier in Matt's gut as Bulma broke into a run, no one following her. Matt did another scan of the park with his eyes. Nobody even moved. Did… she really not have anyone guarding her while she searched for the dragon ball? Would she really be stupid enough to be both the practical figurehead of the biggest corporation on the planet AND by herself in a secluded area while searching for a mystical item that, when paired with 6 other alike ones, granted the holder any wish they wanted?

Apparently so. Matt shrugged.

()()()

Seina caught another glimpse of Bulma right before the sun went down completely. It was easy enough to discern it was her, not just because of her unusual hair color, but because she was in a dead run. An ill feeling of concern got caught up in Seina's gut. What if she had already been attacked or confronted by Matt, and what if she had somehow gotten away? An anxious feeling of obligation caused Seina to begin to pace again. This looked bad. If Matt had been conquered, what if it was up to her to get the ball?

Hold on. That's ridiculous. If Matt already bought the guns he intended to buy, she would have heard a gunshot way before she would have seen Bulma running around. It's not that Matt would actually kill the woman—unless it were by accident—but he would certainly fire somewhere close to her. Just to get her attention, or threaten her. Seina tried to calm herself down. She took a few deep breaths, allowed her heart to stop fluttering for a moment, and got back to the business of staring blankly at the manhole cover, expecting the piece of thread to break and sink the dragon ball into a river of old and shitty water.

()()()

"Shovel, Dad!" Bulma yelled. "I need a shovel, where do you keep the shovel?"

"Dear," said Dr. Briefs, "I keep them in a closet next to the animal dome, but you—"

"Thanks! I'll be back in few minutes, if you'll just—"

"Bulma," he said firmly, "that's enough. You need to calm down and stop obsessing over this nonsense with the arsonists. You have your mother worried sick, and now you're starting to give me the creeps."

Bulma talked as she rummaged through the closet. "Oh, my God, Dad, you don't understand. We could be attacked if we don't do something fast! We need the dragon balls to not be in the hands of these maniacs!"

"This is what I'm talking about! I—"

"Sorry, but I don't have time to talk!"

"Bulma, you're defenseless! If these people are really as dangerous as you say, the least you can do is—"

"Dad, I—"

"The least you can—"

"I have to go, bye!"

"Bulma! Come back!"

But it was too late. Bulma hurried out the door, shovel over her shoulder, in a dead run once again. She heard her father's protestations just barely over the pounding of her footsteps, but she paid them no mind. Truthfully, Bulma knew there was a lot of right in what the good doctor was saying. She was at risk getting this dragon ball. But she was tired of being told she couldn't take care of herself anyway. There was no reason to think that she would be accosted by even the most deranged villain in the middle of a public park at sunset while in West City. After all, Goku had already defeated Piccolo—what out there could be worse than that?

By the time she made it back to the park, it was dark. Not the kind of dark where one couldn't see their hand in front of their own face, but pretty hard to see in nevertheless. Bulma managed to get back to the place where she knew the dragon ball was without having to re-consult the radar, and she began to dig. Her hands started to hurt a little after the first or second shovelful, but she wasn't dissuaded. She gritted her teeth and bore through. Eventually, after about a few inches, she heard the tink sound of the tip of the shovel hitting the dragon ball. She got down on her hands and knees and grabbed the filthy dragon ball out of the ground as if she was uprooting a stubborn plant.

"Yes!"

"Oh, yes, indeed."

Bulma's blood thickened and chilled. She felt something cold and hard press against the back of her head. She flinched away from it. "No sudden moves. And be quiet."

"You—you want the ball, right?" Bulma asked.

"Yes."

Bulma took note of how high and nervous the man's voice was. Whoever he was, he wasn't doing this long. "And you—are you—the one who burned the café down?"

There was a long pause. "And just where in the fuck did you hear about that?"

"It was o—on the news. T-t-the—"

"All right, fine, whatever. No, I'm not the one who burned the café down. My partner is."

"Oh…"

"Now get up. You and I are going to take a little trip."

Bulma got up to a standing position, her hands shaking so violently the dragon ball threatened to drop out of them. She was just as angry as she was scared. How could she have been so stupid? How could see have not seen this coming?

"Now," said her kidnapper, "what I'm going to need you to do is to turn in a half-circle very slowly. As you do this, I'm going to circle with you, making sure to stay behind you the entire time. Ready? Go."

Bulma began to go in a half-circle, perhaps a little too slowly, but by the time she was done she felt like she could think a little more clearly. What else is it that this man could want from her besides the dragon ball? Because if that's all he wanted, he could have already taken it and left. Unless…

"Are you going to kill me?" Bulma asked.

"Not if you behave. Now, we're going to walk down the street to meet up with my partner. I'm going to cover up my gun, but make no mistake, it's still pointed at you. Don't you fuck with me, now."

Bulma had no intention of "fucking with" this thug who had her in his grasp. She walked quickly, and dealt with her terrible feelings regarding the footsteps trailing right behind her. She started to think of her mother and father, and what they must be thinking right now. She's coming home any second, they're probably thinking, and she's going to stay holed up in her with us until this terrible mess gets dealt with by Goku.

Goku. That very name, the very thought of that person, was like a cool breeze in the middle of the desert for her. Bulma could picture it vividly; Goku would come riding in on the nimbus cloud, probably right when the two of them met up with his partner, maybe even after that. Maybe it would be right in the nick of time, with the arsonists threatening to kill her, pointing the gun right at her forehead. He would jump in and knock both of these characters out in a single punch, boom, bang. They would collect the dragon balls the two of them left behind. Who knows, maybe they'd get the rest together like in the old days…

Then Bulma's thoughts turned darker. It was Goku who got her in this mess in the first place. He wasn't careful with that radar the way he should have been, and now it was too late to do anything about it.

"Just another block."

Bulma could already see the partner this man was talking about, because she—a tan-skinned, fearful-looking woman—was running up to meet them. She thought she could hear a sigh as the woman came to a stop in front of Bulma.

"Here's your gun," said the man, handing his partner a pistol. "Try to be less conspicuous next time."

"What now?" the woman asked in a somewhat choked voice. "What happens now?"

"Simple," said Matt. "We're all going to march down to the Capsule Corporation. We're going to take what we need, and we're going to go."

()()()

Dr. Briefs paced in the animal dome, alone with the smell of thick feces as he tried to calm himself. Bulma had gone on such ridiculous adventures before now and had come home fine. What reason did he have to think this would be different?

Suddenly, the door was knocked.

 **TBC**


	13. The Capsule Corp Caper Part 3

"You think these guns are going to be too loud?"

Seina looked at Matt questioningly. "What do you mean? Uh, maybe. I don't know."

"I'm just thinking out loud, here. If we have to use them, they might draw too much attention."

Matt didn't take his eyes away from Bulma and her parents as he talked to his partner. The three of them were lined up against the wall in their own living room, standing directly across from the only door out of the room. Around them, the blinds were drawn on the windows, and the ceiling light was on.

"Well, what do you want to do about it? I'd like it if we didn't have to use the guns at all."

Bulma piped up. "Yeah, I'd like that, too."

"Shut up, you! Seina, I'm going to do everything I can to avoid using these, but goddamned if I don't think I might have to at some point. So here's what you're going to do. Go find the bedroom in this place—it's probably upstairs somewhere—and go get two pillowcases."

"Uh… why?"

"To wrap around the nozzles of the guns. Jesus, you really don't know anything about firearms, do you?"

"You don't either!" Dr. Briefs shouted. "On old guns like that, if you use the pillowcase silencer method, you'll wind up setting this whole damned building on fire! Use your head, man!"

Matt pressed the barrel of his gun right up to the doctor's forehead. "Okay. Then I'll just shoot you with the gun as is."

Mrs. Briefs put her hand on her husband's shoulder, trying to calm him. His angered expression in the face of very possible death had her worried. "Honey, listen to—"

"SHUT UP!" Matt demanded. "I'm not going to ask you again, I swear to God, before I unload a full clip into your fucking head!" He backed away slightly, almost out of breath from shouting. "Seina," he said, "please just do as I asked."

()()()

But she had already left. Seina went down the hallway until the end where there was a staircase. She took the stairs up to the second floor and, realizing there were third and fourth floors, sighed with exasperation. This would have been so much easier if they had just asked the people who actually lived here where the damn bedrooms were. She was of a mind to go and ask them herself, but she didn't want them to talk anymore. There was something in Matt's eyes that was starting to scare her. She felt, and not for the first time, that he was really going to do it. He was really going to shoot them, if he felt like he had to.

Seina wound up being distracted by the pictures on the walls as she traveled down another hallway with three rooms spaced out on each side. The pictures were mostly of the family, but there were also some people in what appeared to be uniforms that she didn't recognize. She saw that they all were wearing the Capsule Corp. logo, so her best guess was that they were just some employees.

Then, just before she got to the last room at the end of the hall to the left, there was a big group picture at… Seina couldn't tell what it was. All she knew was that there was a man in the picture who caught her attention immediately. He had crazy black hair that stuck out in big locks all over the place, and he had a giant smile on his face. Standing next to him, wearing a pretty white dress, was a woman with black hair done up in this sort of traditional-looking way. Because wedding ceremonies in Seina's neck of the woods were so different from the rest of the world's, there was little she had to compare it to. Bulma, the woman Matt had a gun to right now, was somewhere in the background of the picture.

Seina began to wonder if she'd ever get to have a good time like this one again.

But she shook that thought and went into the room the picture was hung up next to. Luckily, it turned out to be somebody's bedroom. Judging by the relative smallness of the bed and the purple paint adorning the walls, Seina assumed it was probably Bulma's room. She found three pillows on the bed, and got the cases off two of them. As she did, yet another picture caught her attention. It was a small one, framed right next to Bulma's bed on the end table, and it featured the same wild-haired boy from the earlier group picture, but he was much younger and smaller, and his grin was even wider and more… childish? Dumb? It was hard to say for sure, but there was something pure in his eyes, something so innocent. She locked eyes with the picture, and felt something… a premonition of something terrible, but not just that—a feeling that she needed to do something to stop it.

()()()

"God damn it," Matt muttered, "where did she go?"

Bulma had to bite her tongue to keep from yelling at Matt, because all he had to do was ask one of them and they could have told Seina where the stupid guest bedrooms were on the third floor. It would have been the most simple thing, just ask. Oh, sure, she would have lied, more than likely, but she could have said something.

"If she isn't here in five minutes," said Matt, "I'm taking one of you with me and we're going to go looking for her. And lest you think I'm giving any two of you the chance to get away from me, keep in mind that if I come down here and see the two gone, I'm killing whoever I brought with me on the spot, so don't tempt me."

With that said, Matt started to pace, with his gun still aimed in the general direction of the three hostages. Dr. Briefs found him to be funny looking, this man—this supposedly skilled criminal, a hunter of the dragon balls—who was walking in a circle while his arm tried desperately to stay pointed in his and his family's direction. It would have been hilarious, except the man had no trigger discipline, and it was plain to see. His finger was constantly resting on the trigger; one good jolt, and his gun would fire, or probably explode in his hand since it was such a hunk of junk.

Between that fact and the obvious nervousness from both of the thugs lead the doctor to just one conclusion; this was definitely their first rodeo. There was no swagger or confidence to anything that they did. They kept making mistakes that they only got away with because Capsule Corp. never had, as a multibillion zenie corporation, prepared itself for this sort of situation. The girl in the duo was especially bad—from the look on her face, one would think she was carrying around a piece of animal waste rather than a gun, and that she would rather be anywhere else than there, doing what she was doing.

"God damn it!" repeated Matt, just as Seina walked back into the living room, two pillowcases in hand.

"What?" Seina asked. Matt whirled around to see her shut the door behind herself. "What is it? What happened?"

"Nothing, it's…" Matt sighed. "I was just thinking I shouldn't have sent you off alone. In case there were security guards in the building with us somewhere."

"Oh," said Seina. "I didn't see anybody. But I got the pillowcases you wanted."

"Hand me one."

Seina tossed one Matt's way, and he managed to catch it on his pointer finger.

"Whose are these, anyway? Whose bedroom did you go to?"

"She went to mine!" Bulma piped up as her mother turned to shush her. Matt swung his arm and pointed the gun right above Bulma's head. His trigger finger twitched with hesitation. Part of him knew he had to make good on his promise to shoot the next person who started talking. Yet, as he actually gazed into the eyes of his helpless victim, the machismo he had been building up from fragile bits and pieces over the last several minutes was beginning to shrink and dissipate like some leftover storm clouds.

"You won't—"

Bulma was interrupted by Matt swinging the gun down and clocking her right on top of her head. Her parents screamed in terror as his happened, watching with dread, hoping Matt's itchy trigger finger didn't pull back. Even Seina, who was watching from the other side of the room, began to feel herself sweat. In a split second, the image of a little girl appeared in her mind. It wasn't a specific little girl, but it was a pale, doll-like one wearing a white dress very similar to the one that woman was wearing in the picture on the second floor.

This is what Matt was doing it for. He was doing it for some little girl he had never even known all that well. This is what she had to remind herself of if she wanted to get through these trials and ordeals. Even though Matt had proven himself over and over to her to be many things she left her town to get away from, though he was self-centered, old-fashioned, had done things to her she didn't want to think about… there was a part of her that still admired his single-minded pursuit of the dragon balls for such an honorable thing. So, she still wanted him to succeed, in spite of some of the things he was deciding to do to get there.

At first, Bulma couldn't see. When her sight came back, she found that she had been mumbling "no, no," for the past… however long it had been. Thirty seconds? A minute? Longer? It was too hard to tell. Matt stood right in front of her as she was slumped to the ground, eyes crotch-level with her captor. Matt saw that there was a small line of blood going from the top of her head and right down her face. He shuddered a little.

"Can you hear me?" he asked. Dr. Briefs took a moment to note the subtle hint of genuine concern in his voice. Whether he was actually concerned for her or concerned for himself, it was too early to say. He would have to keep a close watch on him for the time being, to figure out how the boy's mind ticked.

"Hey," Matt repeated, cupping Bulma's head in his one empty hand. "I need you to stay with me."

"I'm—I'm awake," said Bulma in a dreamy tone, "I'm up."

"Okay, good. Stay with me. Uh, Seina, could you go and get some ice—see if there's an icepack or something in these peoples' freezer. We need to get her wound on ice or something. Hurry up!"

Seina ran out of the room, again acutely aware of the fact that at no point did Matt bother to ask any of the Briefs family where a certain room was. It was starting to feel like some kind of weird, twisted version of some kind of hide-and-seek, but with rooms instead of people. She started by walking toward the door in front of the building, thinking that it would be a likely place drawing off of little more than the scant handful of interiors she had seen since leaving her village, as well as common sense. What is the first thing a person might want after getting back from a long day at work? Food, or some kind of beverage! So, it would therefore stand to reason that the fridge where all the cold food was would be in the room that one first walks into upon entering the average home.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be the wrong way.

Meanwhile, back in the hostage room, Matt paced all over the floor, unable to stop himself, feeling like a shark that would stop breathing and die if it were to interrupt its own ceaseless movement. His nerves were starting to fray about the edges. Had he just killed one of his hostages, and if so, what was going to happen now? What was even the procedure for something like this?

Dr. Briefs continued to watch. Matt was now so nervous, he himself was starting to panic. Forget trying to coolly detach himself from the situation, this was his own daughter, and the only thing standing in the way between her and death was this lunatic who put her closer to death in the first place, and his skittish, seemingly terrified lieutenant who, for all they know, had just decided to run away and never look back. How this man was able to have so much confidence in her led him to conclude that she must be at least as dangerous as him, or approaching that level.

"I have some—"

Matt swung his gun arm so that it was pointing right at the doctor's head and approached. "What did I say to you about talking, old man?! Do you want to be in the same place as this bitch over here?!"

The good doctor bit his lip like it was the last bit of food on the planet, and it barely worked. Logically, there was no point to him even speaking up. He looked over at his daughter, who now seemed to be fully aware and back to looking slightly horrified like the rest of them. Chances are, the head wound wasn't even severe, and the captor seemed to be so taken aback by his own brief brutality, he was not too likely to repeat the thing he'd just done for a while.

Mrs. Briefs, meanwhile, was frozen. She had been stuck in the same position—with her arms stuck out to protect her face—since the moment her daughter had been hit on the head with the gun. Her mouth hung open like the jaws of a novelty nutcracker. Her typically closed or squinting eyes were wide open, not too far from bugging out entirely. Her mind had entirely shut down, having been overloaded with terror for herself and her family. In all of her life, she had never had to deal with an event of this magnitude, with a direct threat to herself and the people she loved, right within her eyesight, directly in the room with her.

It was different for her husband and her daughter. The good doctor was also someone who had never seen such a horror visited directly upon himself, but what he lacked in experience he made up for in having an iron constitution. He was a man who could put his mind to work in these dark times instead of finding it overwhelmed. If necessary, he could even shut off the emotional parts altogether, assessing the situation the way a person might simply assess a long-ago historical event, or some kind of television show. And he continued to do so, even as his daughter's thoughts started to become more scattered and underimagined.

Bulma was the person in the room most equipped to handle the horror this robbery brought with it. Having been on near-countless adventures with a little monkey-boy named Goku and a host of other strange characters, she had been near death more times than she would ever care to think about. Not only had she inherited her father's strong sense of dislocation, and over time learned to use it, she had found it tested many times over, and the testing had only made it greater. But, what may have also been helping her for the last few minutes was the blow to the head, and how it had made everything cloudy, almost like some kind of pleasureless drug trip.

Seina burst into the room with a cold pack clenched in her hand. "Here, I've got it."

"Great!" Matt said. "Give it to her."

Seina handed the cold pack to Bulma, who stared at it blankly. Her mind at this point was full of abstracts. She was still able to tell what was going on and who everyone was, but as far as urgency went, it was far away from whatever land the heiress to the Capsule Corp fortune now occupied.

"Actually," Matt said, "just put it on her head. I don't think she's doing very well right now."

"She needs to be in a hospital!" Dr. Briefs blurted out.

"And I suppose you think I'm just going to call a goddamn ambulance up here," Matt replied, "but I'm not. So if I were you, I'd shut the hell up before this gash gets any deeper for her."

After dropping the ice pack on Bulma's wound, Seina noticed Mrs. Briefs, her mother. She waved her hand in front of her face, trying to get her to come around. She shook the older woman's shoulder a little bit. Nothing.

"Matt," said Seina, "I think we might have two problems."

"Problems?" Matt repeated. "I think I know what you mean. I see two problems also: the blue-haired girl not being in any shape to tell us where the other radar is, and you trying to get attached to these people."

"Matt," said Seina, "we're running out of people to talk to. That old man," and she pointed out the stone-faced Dr. Briefs, "is the only one who's still up. We need him to tell us where the radar and money are, and I don't think he's going to."

"And what makes you say that?"

"Because, Matt, he's got nothing to lose! I've dealt with my father, Matt. Older men are stubborn like this because they know they're going to die soon anyway—"

"You're wrong."

Matt and Seina looked over at the resolute doctor. He continued to speak. "You get my daughter and my wife medical attention, and I'll give you what you want. Do you understand?"

 **TBC**


	14. The Capsule Corp Caper Part 4

"Here's what's going to happen."

Matt had needed time to deliberate with Seina. They had huddled in a corner of the room together, speaking in low tones. Dr. Briefs and family didn't catch a single word of it. When Matt continued to speak, he addressed Dr. Briefs directly.

"Seina here will escort Bulma and your wife to one of your vehicles, preferably a car. She will drive the two of them to the closest hospital, then she will return here. When you and I hear that the car has pulled away—assuming we can hear it—then you're going to start telling me where the loot is. And trust me…"

Matt pressed the barrel of his gun directly against the old man's head. "You do not want to cheat me now. You do not want to find out what I'm going to do if you try to get away. Trust me, it is in your family's best interest to forget about escaping. Do you understand?"

The doctor and Seina both felt a chill at Matt's sudden change of tone. He was getting too good at this, Seina realized, and she was starting to entertain a long-ago worry that this was a man who was finding his element in the darkness. When he first showed up at her village, he was just a determined, if sullen and passive, man who seemed to be in way over his head even as he first walked toward her and her family in the sandy nothingness. Her family. Matt had made them disintegrate literally overnight on that day some months ago. Even if she did go back to her village, her father would never have her come back into the fold. Running away with the man who murdered your fiancée has a way of making a parent think twice about ever having had you in the first place.

Matt was her family now.

"Yes, of course I understand!" Dr. Briefs said after a pause. "All I want is to get my wife and daughter to a hospital, I'll do whatever I have to do!"

"That's good," said Matt, "that's damn good. You two," he turned slightly to the left and pointed his weapon at the near-comatose Mrs. Briefs and her zoned-out daughter, "get up."

Slowly, the both of them lifted themselves up to a standing position. The ice pack, smudged with blood, fell off of Bulma's head. It landed on her foot, and she jolted in an exaggerated show of being startled. Seina crooked her eyebrow at the woman, but said nothing.

"You two women are going to go with Seina," said Matt. "She's going to take you to the hospital."

"I heard," said Bulma drearily. "I can still hear, y'know."

"I'm glad to hear that," said Matt, "because Seina's going to have her gun with her the whole time, and you listening is going to help her a lot in not pulling that trigger."

Seina didn't like the portrait Matt was painting of her at all. She hoped it was just to intimidate Bulma and her mother, and not because he really thought she was some violent lunatic. It took considerable effort for her not to tack "like him" to the end of that last thought. It was hard.

Bulma had a capsule of a helicopter in her pocket. She threw it to the ground outside after being told they needed a vehicle to get to the hospital. The capsule erupted into white smoke, and what sat on the ground in its place was a helicopter big enough to fit four people inside.

"I don't know how to fly one of these," Seina said in a far too casual tone. "Do you?"

"Yep," said Bulma. "It's pretty easy."

"I hope so, because I don't want to get us killed."

Bulma gave Seina a look like she had just tried to scam her and it failed. She was impatient. All of this sitting around and pretending she was in a trance had made her even more antsy than she normally would have been in such a situation. "Why don't you just let me fly the chopper?"

"Because I—" Seina interrupted herself to ponder that question. It wasn't a bad one, if she was being perfectly honest. She really should just sit tight and let Bulma fly the plane. After all, she was the one who knew how to do it, and it was a pretty high-stakes thing to drive one of these. It's not like they were very likely to survive a crash. Besides, with a gun pointed at her head, it's not like she was very capable of doing anything tricky.

"Fine," Seina said. "You can fly. But I swear if you do anything, it's going to… I'm going to…"

"Shoot us?"

Seina felt a tingle go up her spine. The gun in her hand faltered, feeling as if it had gained a hundred pounds as soon as Bulma said that last phrase. She bit her lip. "Please don't make me do it, okay? Please."

In spite of herself, Bulma almost felt her heart go out to this bumbling crook. She almost seemed like an unwitting hostage in her own right. "It's fine. I'm not going to do anything crazy, and…"

Bulma looked over at her mom, who was already trying to get into the helicopter without realizing that it was locked and needed a code to open. "She's not going to do anything either."

"So this is the only other radar?"

Dr. Briefs and Matt had walked over to Bulma's work room while the rest of the group waited outside to leave. "That's the only one," the doctor said, cursing his own cowardice. What was he thinking?! Whatever it was that these two people wanted, they could be a danger to the human race, a danger to the planet! And yet, here he stood, giving this man and his cohort the world for the sake of the lives of three people.

It was during times like this Dr. Briefs wished he'd have started his life in a different direction, one like that of a Goku or a Krillin. Sure, they were muscleheads who had no hope of designing their own gadgets, but when pressure moments like this arose, as they were wont to do, they had all kinds of time. They were able to do amazing things without being behind a bunch of tools, without being augmented by machinery. They were the ones you wanted around when push came to shove, not some elderly intellectual with a screwdriver and no real plan…

Unless he were to come up with one himself…

Seina knew about helicopters. She knew about flight. It was impossible not to know in the modern age. Even in her sequestered little island village, the giant metal "birds" howling as they passed by so high up in the air were impossible to avoid or explain away as something natural. Chief simply told her and anyone else who would listen that they were robots designed to scan the world for any volcanic or earthquake activity, but it was obvious he was only saying that so no one in the village would get curious or try to interact with them in any way. Of course, that backfired often, like when kids would build little sandcastles or volcanoes on the beach in order to fool the airplanes into coming down so they could get a closer look at them.

But as the chopper began to take off, Seina felt her stomach try to drop out of her body. It was mostly from the way the world outside sort of retreated. The hand holding her gun up to Bulma's head began to shake quite a bit, and Bulma feared what might happen if it shook just a little too hard…

"Are you okay over there?" asked Bulma. "Let me guess, this is your first time flying?"

"None of your business."

"Okay. Fair enough. But could you try to just stop shaking a little bit? You're going to shoot that gun off right at my head without meaning to!"

Seina's face faltered. She'd never thought of that. What if she just shot Bulma in the head while they were in midair? The more she thought about it, the more the idea frightened her. She could vividly picture their helicopter plummeting out of the sky the split second she shot the blue-haired woman in the head, exploding upon impact into a massive, nuke-like ball of fire and smoke.

Seina took her gun away from Bulma's head. "Thank you," Bulma said, and then out of her peripheral vision she caught Seina instead choosing to point the gun into the backseat. "Mom!"

"That's right," said Seina, trying to sound intimidating. "Don't do anything that'll make me, uh, do something I'll have to regret!"

"What are you talking about?!"

"What does it look like I'm talking about?! Fly to the hospital and don't do anything stupid!"

Matt looked at the information on the sheet of paper carefully. He was now in Dr. Briefs' own work/office space. "So, this is the routing number… the account number… the PIN… credit card number… everything's here. And this is the most recent information you have to offer?"

"Yes," said Dr. Briefs. "This is the company's main account. We have some other, smaller accounts for back-up funds, but generally—"

"About how much in back-up funds? Like—give me a percentage of how much of your overall money is in these accounts."

The doctor just shrugged. It wasn't like he was the company's accountant. Normally, for a question like that, he'd be willing to call the guy up and ask himself, but it was so late at night and, besides, he doubted very seriously if Matt would want another person to know about what was going on up here tonight. In fact, if the doctor even suggested it, the logical option for Matt would be to conclude it was an escape attempt and shoot him to avoid dealing with that issue.

"I honestly don't know," said Dr. Briefs. "We have a few million zenie in each of them, but I don't know exactly how much. I'm not the best one to ask about all of this financial stuff—I don't pay a whole lot of attention to it, to be honest!"

"It's your money," said Matt, "how do you just not pay any attention to it?"

"I said 'not a whole lot of attention,' please don't misquote me. When you start to have as much money as this family has, it gets hard to keep track of it all."

After folding up the doctor's documents and shoving them into his pocket, Matt pressed the barrel of his revolver against the doctor's temple. "Let's go, I want to get all your credit and debit cards."

Seina and the Briefs women were several miles away from the Capsule Corp building when it occurred to Seina that, because she didn't know the layout of the town at all, they could be heading to somewhere completely different from a hospital. What if Bulma was just going to land them right on a police station or fly them somewhere completely out of the way? She pictured herself managing to survive a plane crash caused on purpose, Bulma having escaped with or without her mother, and trying desperately to figure out where the hell she had landed and how she was going to make it back to where Matt was with a revolver in hand and wounds from a plane crash.

Seina's eyes darted back and forth between Bulma in the driver's seat and her mother in the backseat, tracing the darkened outlines of their faces for any signs of sabotage. It was Bulma she needed to be most concerned about… unless it wasn't. Could it be that her mother's a really good actor rather than a traumatized housewife who's in way over her head? Was this some kind of long-game trap that she was falling into? A car would have been easy to escape, and it was certain that Capsule Corp had plenty of those laying around somewhere, but for some reason, the helicopter was decided upon. Why the most dangerous form of transportation, and why the one that only Bulma knew how to use?

"I don't like this," Seina said out loud.

Bulma's blood went to ice. "Why not?"

"You've got way too much power over what happens in this thing. Turn around. We're going back."

"If this isn't all of them," said Matt as he shoved several cards down the front pockets of his pants, "then you and I are going to have some serious words."

"That's everything," said Dr. Briefs. "Everything from my wallet, everything from hers. My daughter doesn't have her own cards anymore, we stopped letting her have them."

"Fascinating," said Matt, who was clearly not at all fascinated. "Well, I suppose all that's left to do is hang out in this big, empty place together until Seina calls and lets us know something. I assume your daughter will be in good enough shape to give Seina the number to this place?"

"I don't know," said the doctor. "I hope so."

"Well, if not, then… we'll give her about an hour. If she still hasn't called by then, we're taking one of your cars and going up there. Last thing in the world I need is something happening to my partner."

"That girl," said Dr. Briefs, "is in over her head. I'm really surprised she's involved with you."

Matt pressed the barrel of his gun against the skin of Dr. Briefs' head once again. "What the hell does that mean, old man?"

"It means what it sounds like. How did she even get mixed up with you?"

Matt's expression didn't change as he switched the gun around, holding it by the barrel, and brought the handle of it down on the doctor's head, in a very similar way as he did with the old man's daughter. Dr. Briefs allowed a sharp gasp of pain to exit through his lips, and his hands shot up to the top of his head as he slumped to the floor.

"Another peep out of that goddamn smart mouth of yours," Matt growled, "and we're going to have to take you to the hospital next. Get what I'm saying?"

Dr. Briefs hadn't quite expected Matt to retaliate so angrily and so soon, but otherwise, everything was set up for him to execute his plan. The doctor allowed himself to go entirely slack, letting his hands fall away from his head wound, which was relatively minor in comparison to his poor daughter's.

"Oh, great," said Matt. He nudged the body with his foot. "Get up, I didn't hit you that hard." But the sudden slight quiver in his voice said otherwise. The doctor did his best to portray someone who was out like a light.

"Okay, then how about this?"

Dr. Briefs yelled out in pain. With one swift kick, Matt had nearly busted his arm bone. It strained hard against the force, and despite being old, managed to hold together. But the cruel agony was there all the same.

"Damn you!" shouted the doctor. "Damn you, you've broken it! Now I need to go see a doctor!"

"You'll be seeing an undertaker before you see a doctor," Matt said simply. "You still don't seem to be getting the bigger picture here. My girl and I are in control. Whether or not you live or die tonight depends on how happy we are until we leave this place."

"Oh, nonsense!" the doctor snapped. His entire scientific mind was screaming at him that this was stupid, to be yelling at the man with the gun after all the progress he'd made in getting him to calm down, getting him to allow the women out of the house, and now that he seemed so close to leaving it was about to be all thrown away, but none of that was enough to stop the sudden torrent of anger that unleashed itself from behind Dr. Briefs' logical mind. No longer was he just some rich inventor or a corporate figurehead. He was a father.

"Nonsense!" He repeated, louder. "Neither of you are the killing type! This whole time, I've been watching the two of you bumble your way through this with nothing but sheer luck! Just a bunch of damn happenstance! You assumed we didn't own guns, you assumed there weren't armed guards, and you were right about those things, because God forbid my family and I get to have a normal, carefree life without leeches and thieves like you making a mess of it!"

He coughed a little bit, his voice straining from the copious shouting he didn't normally do, before continuing. "But you don't have it in you to kill, I don't think your heart is dark enough, and I don't think hers is either. Whatever in the world it could be that you two want with the dragon balls, you aren't doing the right thing by seeking them through violence. The stories I could tell you… the stories my daughter could tell you, they would curl the hairs in your nose and singe them right out! No one who has ever pursued those balls for evil has succeeded, and you won't be the one who does! Especially not the way you're holding that gun, like someone who has to, instead of someone who wants to."

Matt tore his cold glance away from the doctor to look at his own hand. To his horror, he found that the doctor was right; the hand that held his gun was holding on to it for dear life. It was as if the gun was a piece of the side of a cliff, the only thing that was holding him up, keeping him from falling into an abyss so far beneath him he couldn't even look down and see what it was. It was just an endless, bottomless, nameless, formless thing beneath him, a thing of yawning emptiness, and this whole quest… was like hoping something wouldn't come out of that hole and pull him in.

"Matt," said Dr. Briefs, "you don't want to do this. You don't want to rob people, do you? Or hurt people? Kill them?"

Matt's fist clenched around the handle of the gun. If he closed his eyes, he could almost feel some kind of hand or tentacle wrapping around his foot and preparing to pull him so far down…

"You don't want this. Put the gun down."

The younger man's trigger finger moved away from its home resting on the trigger, choosing instead to press itself down the length of the weapon's barrel.

"Come on. Think this through. Sit down. For God's sake, my arm, it's killing me. Don't you see, all you've done is broken an old man's arm?"

A knock on the door startled Matt and Dr. Briefs. They were on the opposite side of the hallway by now, and the best guess unspoken between the both of them was that Seina made a quick trip up there and a quick trip back. Either that or it was a very unfortunate stranger.

"Doc," said Matt, "why don't you get up and answer the door. You know, just in case it's someone you know. If it's someone I've never seen, I'm going to have to bring them into this. You know that."

Dr. Briefs had to concede to the young man's point. Or, at least, he would have, had there not been a peephole on the door for Matt to look through at his whimsy. "Why don't you just look through the peephole and see who it is?" Dr. Briefs asked. "If it's anyone other than the girl you're with, I'll answer it."

The door was knocked again. Matt shook his head, figuring the old man was just looking for any excuse to not have to get up now that he had a bad arm and a knot on his head. Matt looked through the peephole.

Immediately, his stomach dropped. Yeah, Seina was there, alright. So were two very familiar looking women standing behind her, looking sheepish. Matt flung the door open and started shaking his gun at Seina's face. "And just what in the fuck are the three of you doing back?!"

"I wasn't liking it," Seina said, taken aback enough by Matt's brash rage that she forgot all of the explanation that had been resting on the tip of her tongue just before her partner answered the door. "I wasn't feeling it!"

"What do you mean?! Get in the goddamn house and—"

"Matt, watch it!"

A scream from either Bulma or her mother, Matt couldn't quite tell in the commotion. It couldn't have lasted longer than five seconds. Matt turned around just in time to see that the doctor had some kind of blunt instrument in his hand, what appeared to be a vase or a candlestick, and had it held up to strike Matt when a bullet sliced through his left cheek and out through just behind his ear. His face contorted into a look of total agony, and his hand immediately clamped onto the exit wound. He slumped to the ground, bleeding out.

 **TBC**


	15. The Capsule Corp Caper Part 5

When Goku touched down at he and his wife's house in the middle of the night with their son sleeping in, he had expected that she would be fast asleep. Instead, when he entered the house, not only was Chi-Chi very much awake, she practically attacked him as soon as he shut the door behind himself.

"What?" Goku whined as Chi-Chi tried to strike him, to no avail. He grabbed her hands out of the air and gripped them just tightly enough that she couldn't move them. "What's wrong?! I'm sorry, I didn't think I'd be out so late! See—"

"You said you were going to be back hours ago!"

"I didn't even get to Roshi's!" Goku shouted over Bulma's screams. "Gohan and I got lost and went to a park for a few hours, that's it!"

"Something's going on with Bulma!" Chi-Chi yelled. "She's being attacked or something, while you're out all day long with our son! I thought you were just palling around with all your old friends!"

"What are you-? How did you find out?! Was she here?! Who told you?!"

Chi-Chi gave Goku the full explanation, about the arsonists and the sudden, horrible realization Bulma had when she looked at the dragon radar. By the time Chi-Chi was done, Goku had already put Gohan to bed and grabbed his power pole, preparing for what sounded like a potential fight.

"Don't worry," said Goku, "Bulma's smart, Bulma's resourceful. I bet she's got some kind of plan in case I don't get there in time. You stay here and look after Gohan, I'll be back soon!"

()()()

Seina looked at her reflection in the surface of the water in the toilet as if she were expecting it to talk back to her. She was close enough to herself, a small concentric circle formed in the water every time she exhaled. In the background, she could still hear Bulma struggling against her restraints and Dr. Briefs crying out in pain and breathing roughly, hoarsely.

Her stomach clearly wanted her to vomit. But then again, she hadn't eaten since that morning. Her head throbbed. When she moved it, she felt like she would fall over. Matt hadn't talked to her much since she shot the old doctor. All he did was command her around in his usual way, like he'd done since they arrived in this city. West City. She never was going to be able to come back here after all of this was said and done. If she was even free to roam around after her and Matt were finished with their business, she'd go to a place that was like her old home. She would go somewhere where the rest of the world couldn't see the look on her face.

"Seina!" Matt called. "I need help in here."

Seina closed her eyes and lifted her head away from the toilet. Nothing was coming out. Her stomach didn't seem to be trying to lift everything out so much as stir it all around inside her. She went into the living room.

Dr. Briefs was on a couch, dancing back and forth between consciousness and sleep. The entrance and exit wounds from the gunshot were patched with duct tape, but the blood was still leaking through them. Somehow, the doctor's carotid artery was missed, but he was still pale and sickly from the incessant blood loss, and his voice was clearly choked with blood. Any time he woke up, his hand went straight to his throat instinctively, trying to keep his precious bodily fluids inside. It seemed like he wasn't able to recognize anyone anymore, or was in such pain that he didn't care who was around him.

The doctor's wife was laying on another couch across the room, the one in front of the television. She was out like a light, even though her eyes couldn't have been more open. All that was left in her eyes was pure horror. Nothing else that could define her as a person. It was as if they were two small, white canvases with little splotches of blue in them. It unnerved Bulma to look at her like this. She was so used to seeing Mrs. Briefs with her eyes closed and a jolly expression. But there was nothing to be jolly about.

Bulma herself was struggling against her restraints, to no avail. While Seina had held a gun to her head, Matt got ready to wrap her entire torso in duct tape and tie her to a kitchen chair in the middle of the room. Matt's face scared her—he looked like someone who was in way over his head, who wasn't controlling the moment. Desperate people had a habit of not thinking their decisions all the way through. Before his partner shot her father—a fact that she was trying hard not to think too much about—he seemed to understand exactly what he wanted and where everything was heading in relation to that. That gunshot had turned things into a free-for-all in seconds.

"Seina," said Matt as she walked into the room, "I need you to help me tie up these other two once I'm finished with this one."

"The other two?"

Matt looked at her incredulously as Bulma gawped in terror. He began to rant, unable to stop himself. His voice rose louder the longer he rambled. "Yes! The only fucking two in here who aren't tied up! Just do what you did earlier, just hold your fucking gun up to their head while I do all the work! Do you think you can handle that?! Do you think you can handle one simple goddamned task?! Do you think you can handle doing anything at all right tonight?! First you go against what I told you to do—just go and escort Bulma and her mom to the goddamn hospital! That's all! But you had to go and get flight fright or whatever the fuck! Then, as if that wasn't enough to piss everything away for the both of us, you shoot Dr. Briefs! I could have wrestled that guy into submission easily, all you had to do was say 'watch out behind you' and let me take care of the rest!"

"He had a thick glass vase in his hand!" Seina countered. "He would have broken your head with that thing, just like you did to Simone!"

Matt's jaw dropped. Bulma noticed how red-faced Matt was becoming. "Simone," whoever they were, was some kind of soft spot for him. Matt stepped toward her, slowly, cautiously, like a predator stalking its prey.

"So that's what this is about," Matt said in a voice almost low enough to be a whisper. "After all this time, you're still holding that one against me."

"It's not that I'm holding it—"

"AFTER ALL THIS TIME!" bellowed Matt, his hands shaking. "I just couldn't save your life without you finding some way to bitch and moan about that!"

"You didn't save my life!" Seina shouted. "You didn't see what I was seeing! Simone was just about to let me up, he was just about to, when YOU came up behind him and caved his skull in! That sounds familiar, doesn't it?!"

"So that's it then!" Matt said. "We both just get in each other's way! Why the hell are we even teamed up, after all this time?! What are we doing together that we couldn't do apart?!"

Seina fell silent, her gaze falling away from Matt's to Bulma's, as if expecting her to have the answer for her. When she didn't, she turned away, and that was all Matt needed.

"Forget it, then," said Matt. "I won't tie her up. I have an even better idea."

Matt pressed the barrel of his own gun right up to Bulma's head and began to squeeze the trigger, but his finger froze. It grew so cold, it felt like it could chip off. Seina had turned around to see what his "better idea" was, and the breath she'd just inhaled caught in her body. Her hands dove for her mouth instinctively. She couldn't stop looking at Bulma's face. Tears were starting to form in the edges of her eyes.

"Goku…" she whined out a name that only one person in the room could recognize—herself. Two guns were now pointed at her head. All night, she had been sure of one thing—Goku would come, as he always did, right in the nick of time. But that wasn't a law of the universe, was it? It was just luck, the kind of foul luck that let her live through adventure after adventure long enough to see this day. Shot down like an animal with her parents in the same room. At least they weren't able to watch her die.

"No!"

Bulma unclenched her face, opening her eyes. Matt and Seina were now pointing their guns at each other.

"Seina," Matt said, attempting to project calm through a voice like a flickering candle, "think about this. Think."

Seina said nothing.

"This…" Matt started to say, before gulping whatever was in his mouth down and holding his hand out to Seina, clenching and unclenching a fist. "It was always going to be like this. These people… they have friends. Of course they have friends! They're multi-billionaires! Who's Goku?! People know these people, Seina, people know HER!" He gestured with his head at Bulma, who was trying to disassociate herself from the situation before Matt rudely pulled her back in. "If we let even one person… they'll tell everyone. They know what we look like. They know our first names. It'll take them days… hours… you know this, right? You had to know this!"

Matt himself was just getting accustomed to the idea. How could he have been so blind, even as he bought the guns that would be used for the exact purpose?

"Please," Seina said in a whisper what her eyes were screaming out. "Please."

"Please what?"

"Please."

"God damn it—" Matt walked forward, pressing the gun against Seina's head the way it was against Bulma's just seconds ago. Seina's response was to put hers against Matt's chest. Matt began to talk in a low growl. "Can you pull the trigger? Can you really do it?"

Seina nodded, but refused to make eye contact. It occurred to Bulma suddenly that she could move freely. Neither of them had their gun fixed on her, a fact that wasn't likely to change if she started to make moves. The two of them were deadlocked. It was a Cold War scenario—no one wanted to be the shooter, but they had to convince the other that they were willing. For one to move their gun from the other would be suicide.

At least, Bulma hoped.

"Can you pull the trigger," repeated Matt, "or not? Because one of us has to. One of us is going to."

Seina tried to get her shaking under control, hoping that, somewhere underneath Matt's dirty clothes, he was doing the same.

"I've killed, Seina," Matt said evenly. "I know the difference between someone who can and someone who can't. Remember out in the desert? You would have left me for good, dragon balls be damned, but you just couldn't do it. Fuck all that talk about what you planned and you knew you'd come back. You tried to kill me. You couldn't, and you know something? You still can't."

It was then that Matt jumped, his heart making a dive for his throat. The sound he thought was Seina's gunshot was Bulma kicking the chair down beneath herself with her own speed. She made a great dive for the door. She almost succeeded.

Matt had a funny reaction to a rush of his own adrenaline. He saw the worst case scenario—an escape—happening, and time slowed. He could count Bulma's footsteps as her legs carried her in long, heavy strides, he could feel them beneath his own feet, he swore he could even time his breathing with hers. He went blind, except for the form of Bulma. The world around her faded to black. With a motion so swift, but that felt so gentle and easy, he pointed his gun at the doorway Bulma was heading for. She was right at the frame when Matt's bullet caught her in the side of the head, escaping through the other side. She was dead before she hit the ground.

Seina's own vision blurred and danced. When Bulma's body dropped to the ground, she focused on the blood splatter on the wall, Matt's bullet having embedded itself somewhere in the center of it. In her temporary madness, the blood splatter reminded her of one of those rainbow effects from the Road Runner cartoons smuggled in from the mainland she used to watch at a friend's house when she was little. Sometimes, when Coyote was hit with something real hard, a kaleidoscopic sort of rainbow effect would go on screen for a moment, to signify the seriousness of the injury. Or maybe that's what the coyote was seeing. She didn't know. But the blood splatter on the wall looked like that. But all red.

Matt gently took the gun out of Seina's hand and watched her for a reaction. He expected her to either do something mad and violent, or this thing she was doing now, which was going into shock. It was a relief for Matt to no longer have to talk Seina away from the proverbial ledge, but this presented a whole new set of problems. He pictured himself trying to lug her around on his back like a knapsack, arms draped over his shoulders, legs dangling loosely, while behind him an army of men came crashing down like a mack truck, barely registering having run him completely over.

"Seina," he said, smacking her, "Seina."

She refused to come to.

"Seina, I've got some bad news." He paused, gulping. This was as much to himself as it was to her. "If you didn't like what I did with Bulma… well, the other two…"

()()()

Goku felt something he hadn't felt since his fight with Piccolo—a feeling of danger, something he hadn't associated with quite the emotions everyone else was expecting him to.

Danger was fun. Danger was a new challenge, and whatever form it took didn't matter, the more formidable, the better. Here he was, with a family now, but sometimes he would wonder to himself what the next adventure would be. If it would take the form of another fight with King Piccolo. If it would be something like this. Now he had his answer!

West City would have been in his sights were it not for the blackness of night, the bed of clouds where he was in the atmosphere. He couldn't wait to get low enough to get out the lights of the city, a rare treat for him in his days of living in the forest. When he slowly brought himself down in a few minutes in front of Capsule Corp, he would see lights.

()()()

Seina sat and watched listlessly as Matt executed Mr. and Mrs. Briefs. She wondered to herself, what was the point of regret? Of remorse? She saw all the remorse she needed in Matt's face as he did what he did. Mrs. Briefs brought him nearly to the point of tears, because Matt's thought was just the same as Seina's as the shot rang out—she didn't do anything. She was just collateral. She was just in the way.

Matt used her gun to do it. He knew what he had to do, to keep Seina in line. Both the handle and the trigger had her fingerprints on it. That was just further leverage for him. Tough, but fair. They'd come this far together. They had to see it through to the end. Too much has been lost for nothing to come out of what just happened here.

"I didn't do it for nothing," Matt began to say over and over to his own hands, his own two calloused, white hands, hands that had no business being white, with linings and cracks in the palms through which blood could begin to spill, drops of it, sips, gallons, more than he could begin to drink back into himself, keep to himself—

"Matt!"

-convey to himself, as a few thousand pounds of it gushed, soaking the whole room like a sudden flash flood, up to his ankles, his knees, his—

There was a shriek outside, a sudden piercing one. He recognized it immediately, while Seina looked ready to die at the sound of it. Police were coming.

After a quick check of his pockets—all the card stuff was still there—Matt grabbed Seina's hand and dragged her, barely keeping up, dragon balls, to the back end of the house. At the farthest end was a kitchen, with a sliding glass door leading out to a back patio. Head first, Matt rushed through it and ran for the shrubbery cutting off the Briefs' backyard from the neighboring buildings, most of which were other businesses. He heard no voices, saw no people. It was late. Behind him, Seina had started to vomit. Both of them, for the last time in their relationship, were in sync. They never wanted any of this. They never wanted to run. They never wanted to stop.

()()()

Goku touched down in front of Capsule Corp well past midnight. Two or three police cars were there. He hadn't expected that. Several police who saw him were knocked to their asses with fear at the strange man riding a cloud.

"Hey!" Goku said to the closest policeman, who looked at him strangely. He cleared his throat, the policeman, and tried to speak as normally as he could. "This is a crime scene. You shouldn't be here."

"Where's Bulma?" asked Goku.

The policeman got up. "You knew the family?" He knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as Goku's expression dropped.

"Wh-Where…" Goku started to ask, before giving up and rushing into the building. "Wait!" he heard too late, stopping on a dime right in front of some police tape that had been put up in the hallway. There was a body on the floor, beneath a sheet. The policeman from outside had followed him in. Goku turned to him, pointing at the body. This was wrong. He was forgetting how to speak.

"Who…?" He asked, knowing already.

 **TBC**


	16. Blowback

"How could we have let this happen?"

Goku stood in Master Roshi's living room, staring down at his own hands. He was with Krillin and Yamcha, who had been weeping on and off for the last two hours. News of the Briefs family's deaths had hit all of them remorselessly. Yamcha had been hoping to take his and Bulma's relationship more seriously in the future, once he was done "discovering himself" in a journey of city life and odd jobs that seemed, in retrospect, utterly hollow.

"How could I," Goku corrected himself, "have let this happen?"

"No, Goku," said Roshi. Goku looked up. "You couldn't stand around her all day, every day, to protect her. You have a beautiful wife and son. No one could have asked you to do that. No, son, there's only one person to blame here, and that's whoever did this."

"The police said… it was probably a group of people." Goku said slowly, unused to being so reliant on information and speculation from strangers. "Two or more."

"Any idea what they look like?" Krillin asked. "If they were people or… monsters?"

Yamcha spoke up. "Krillin, they used guns. Whoever they were, they were people, which means we could have stopped them. But…"

The room fell quiet. Goku coughed, holding back a sob. "The police told me they didn't know what any of them looked like. They didn't get there until it was… until it was already too late."

He clenched his fists and unclenched them over and over. The warrior, the champion of the World Martial Arts Tournament, had never felt so utterly helpless. This wasn't right. He should have been out there. But there was nothing to go off of—the thieves, whoever they were, had taken the dragon radar that Bulma was working on. Not like he would have been able to finish it himself, but the two people who could have were…

"I need to go!" Goku sprung up, smiling suddenly, feeling the old familiar tingle of adventure creeping into his grief.

"Go?!" Yamcha cried. "Where?! Do you have an idea or something?"

"Dr. Flappe!" Goku said. "If I could get him to make another dragon radar, I could find those guys! They were probably hunting for the dragon balls, so it'd be easy to get to them and their balls! We can bring back Bulma and her parents with the dragon balls!"

"Dr. Flappe," Master Roshi repeated. "Wasn't that the old scientist you met while you were fighting the Red Ribbon Army?"

"Yeah! I met him right after I brought down Muscle Tower. He removed the bomb from Eighter, so making a dragon radar shouldn't be a problem either!"

"I'll go with you," said Krillin. "In fact… I think you should let Yamcha and I go. So you can be with Chi-Chi and Gohan. I know Chi-Chi's real upset."

"You can't ride the Nimbus, Krillin," Goku said. "Remember?"

"Oh… good point."

"Also, you don't even know where Flappe is. He lives way far to the North."

Krillin rubbed his bald head, feeling stupid that he even suggested going in Goku's place. "…Okay, I get it. But Chi-Chi and Gohan-"

"Krillin, my family will be fine. Yamcha, could you look after my family while I'm gone?"

"Yeah, sure. No problem!" Yamcha's eyes had also lit up. Suddenly, the possibility of all of this horror being reversed seemed tangible. Goku's confidence almost made him feel like they were already back again.

"And Krillin—look around West City, see if you can find something yourself? Even if you find just one of them, or somebody who knows something about what happened to Bulma, it would help."

Krillin nodded, amazed at Goku's easy resumption of a leader-like role. "You got it."

"Great. Then it's settled. Nimbus!"

()()()

"… _BREAKING NEWS: A horrific tragedy has struck West City, and perhaps the world, today. In a disturbing act of violence, the family that founded Capsule Corp.—the Briefs—were found dead early this morning in their home on the first floor of the Capsule Corp. building. Police are investigating this as a homicide…"_

"Can you fuckin' believe it?" a man in a trench coat and slightly stained mall cop uniform asked his work partner, a thin man. They stood in front of a TV in a department store window. "This shit's already on the news, and the sun's just now coming out."

"What do you expect?" the thin man replied. "Fuckin' important people died today. I mean, the Briefs family? Wouldn't be surprised if the king doesn't get involved. Make today a national holiday or some shit."

The trench coat man shrugged. "Oh, sure, but that's not our problem. Shit, the economy's going to be a problem more than anything."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, shit, think about it. Thousands of people are going to wake up this morning to find out their bosses just got shot up and robbed. All their goddamn money got stolen, too. I know because this morning, my friend who works at the bank said that some guy came in, some kinda stinky-looking guy, came in and withdrew, like, billions and billions of zenie from the bank all at once!"

"Whoa!" The thin man took a moment to try and imagine—billions of zenie. A person could live on their ass for the rest of their lives with that kind of cash. "Didn't they get suspicious?"

"Well, yeah, but there was really nothing they could do about it because he had everything—and I mean everything. There aren't any laws in West City preventing someone from getting all their money out at once, as long as they have all the codes and whatnot. The cops came by just one hour later, looking for the bastard, saying that he was using account info that was stolen from the Briefs compound the night they were murdered. Everyone there felt like a total ass—like, what, this homeless guy just so happened to have all this shit because it was his?"

"My question is, how the hell was this guy able to get all the money out of the same bank? How much money can one bank have in it?"

"Apparently, old Mr. Briefs is real—well, was real superstitious about putting all his company's money in different banks. Least, that's what my friend told me."

"But it's like you said, though—"

"That's right, it's like I said."

The thin man checked his watch. "Guess we'd better get back to it, huh?"

"Yep."

()()()

Goku dropped from his Nimbus cloud directly into Jingle Village, not far from where Muscle Tower had fallen all those years ago. In his haste, he realized he hadn't been very discreet, and a lot of villagers gawped at the man with the strange hair who just dropped out of the sky and into the middle of their village.

"Hi, there," Goku said as cheerfully as he could given the circumstances, "I'm Goku. I'm just here to visit Dr. Flappe, does anyone know if he's in?"

"Oh, sure," said one of the villagers, trying to be as normal as possible given the circumstances, "he's at his office. Do you need directions?"

"Nah, I've got it. Say, if any of you know Suno and Eighter, just tell them I'm sorry for not visiting with them, but I'm really in a hurry."

()()()

The thin security guard, whose name was Rich in a twist of cruel irony considering his security job and alimony payments left him in a state of almost constant poverty, had paused in his pacing around the electronics store to stare at the TV that was still broadcasting the story of the Briefs murders. The news was so bad, it actually was starting to effect the global economy, just like his friend had said. People were panicking, buying up all the capsules they possibly could before presumably no more could be made. Workers for the Capsule Corporation were furloughed indefinitely as the investigation into the Briefs murders continued. Even the world's King was making a statement about the brutal attack.

Just like his friend had predicted.

Across the store, Rich heard some people talking about it in hushed tones. Specifically, they were talking about the fact that, on the other side of the mall, there was a large, large crowd at the Capsule store, most of them were fighting their way in to buy shit, but some of them were grieving. A few of them even had candles, which they weren't allowed to have lit in the building. It was tragic, sure, but holding a vigil in a mall just seemed ridiculous.

Rich felt like he needed to be over there. But what good was he, a single guard, going to be against a riot waiting to break out? People tended to overreact to situations that, ultimately, were of no real consequence to them and would be solved with or without their weirdness. If more folks would just leave themselves out of situations they couldn't help, and stop trying to force things to be better, the world might actually get a little bit better, Rich figured. Or maybe that was just something he told himself to feel better about his own secret cowardice and ambivalence.

There was a funny smell in the room that Rich could no longer ignore. It was just a grimy, unwashed scent, like clothes that had been worked in way too much. Rich took his eyes away from the news report and saw, just a few yards away, a filthy-looking man staring up at another one of the big TVs broadcasting the same story. His hair was matted and his skin looked like it was coated in a fine film of sweat. Then again, it could have just been oil, it was hard to tell right off the bat.

For some reason, Rich wasn't fond of the filthy-looking man from the moment he laid eyes on him. He was thin and scoundrel-like, the sort of guy who would follow a woman in the dead of the night, eyes fixated at first on her purse but then on her buttocks. The clothes he was wearing looked like they just came off the rack, but the rest of him looked like it had hadn't seen the business end of a showerhead since sometime last month. He had the collar of his expensive trench-coat popped so that the bottom half of his face wasn't visible.

"Excuse me. Sir?"

Rich spoke, but the man didn't reply verbally. Instead, he held his hand out toward the security guard in a gesture meaning "wait a moment." Rich wanted to get angry, get rough with his man who probably had stolen clothes on right now because he thought he could get away with robbery in the midst of all this chaos, but then he remembered that it was really just the two of them. What good did it do either of them for this guy to be kicked out?

"Terrible thing, isn't it?"

Rich was surprised at the sound of the man's voice when he finally spoke up. It was nothing at all like what he was expecting. Nothing gruff or coarse about it. He sounded young and kind of frail. Rich walked a little closer to the man, hoping he didn't appear too much like he was strongly considering arresting the man—or worse, afraid that he was going to have to do that. "It is, sir," said Rich. "May I ask where you got the clothes?"

Keeping his eyes fixed to the screens, the man fished a crumpled receipt from the pocket of his brand new jacket and handed it to Rich. Rich was stunned to see everything the man was wearing accounted for. Almost 30,000 zenie worth of clothes were there. The poor guard had never even seen that much money in person before in his life.

"Thank you, that checks out," said Rich in a collected monotone. He handed the receipt back. Now he had no idea what to say. Unless they'd recently passed a law saying people could be arrested for giving Rich the creeps, he was shit out of luck.

"…as of yet, we still do not have any information about the suspects of the shooting. However, we have reports of a man having used all of Capsule Corps' stolen banking information to withdraw the full amount of their funds. Here is a composite sketch—"

The man abruptly began to walk away. The TVs flash large pictures of the composite sketch, showing the guard that at least the top half of this stranger's face looked a hell of a lot like the sketch. Rich drew his stun gun. "Hold it right there, sir!"

The man stopped walking.

"P-P-Put your hands behind your head! I'm warning you!" Rich's face started to get red. He'd never had to draw his stun gun in his entire time working at this mall. It was a time like this where he finally understood what his friend was talking about when he said, over and over again, that it was bullshit he and the other guards weren't allowed to carry their own guns. Any other day, the idea sounded ridiculous.

"Are you listening, sir?!"

Rich's trigger finger shook. The man put his left hand on his head and got down on his knees, still facing away from Rich. His right hand once again fished into his pocket. Rich was close. He was damn close to pulling the trigger. He knew this man was reaching for his gun. In seconds, he would turn around and fire. He saw it all so clearly. But what if he missed? What if the man was actually submitting? Rich hated the thought of being responsible for the injury of an innocent man. He knew how strong his stun gun was. It wasn't something to be just used without absolute certainty.

But the man's hand began to retract from his coat pocket. It was pulling something out with it. The trigger of the stun gun started to bend backwards toward Rich at the behest of his pulling finger.

"Wait. I have money."

The man's four simple words, combined with an enormous deck of money in the hand that had just left his pocket, changed Rich's life forever.

"You can take this money," said the man, whose own voice was dead with calm and apathy, like what Rich imagined the voice of a ghost would be like. "You can take this money and let me go. Or, you can take me to prison, and the money will be confiscated. You'll never get another chance like this, man. Come on."

Rich paused. The hand pointing the stun gun at Rich fell to his side.

()()()

"But, Dr. Frappe," Goku said in a begging voice unbecoming of him because of its sheer desperation and sincerity, "if you can't fix a new dragon radar… there's no hope. Please. This is the only real chance I've got of finding the people who did this."

"I'm sorry, Goku," said Dr. Frappe, sitting at a table of beakers and liquids like most might imagine a typical mad scientist doing, "but without some kind of frame of reference, I'm afraid I can't just replicate the technology you're talking about. If you only had some kind of a blueprint, or a computer that would have a blueprint in it…"

"A computer?" asked Goku. "Is that one of those things with the screens? Kinda like windows?"

Dr. Frappe sat for a second, amazed at Goku's question, before pointing across the room to a computer sitting at another workstation. "That's a computer. Chances are, the Briefs had at least a couple of them in the household—one for father, one for daughter—and at least one of them has the information for how to make a dragon radar on it. You need to go back to that crime scene before they take those computers for themselves."

Goku stood up. "Sorry I can't stay, but there's no time to waste."

()()()

A couple was hiking together on a path just on the edge of town. A park with a green, still lake that a rope bridge was lazily slung across. Once the two of them were on the other side, it was peaceful. The man was just happy to be doing something that didn't cost any money. The woman was just happy to be doing something the man couldn't get too absorbed to talk during. Neither of them noticed the shabby-looking woman behind the tree they walked past on the way to the last half of the trail, but they could smell something like sweat and fear in the air.

Seina watched the backs of the two as they continued along the hiking trail. "It's so simple," she said almost inaudibly. Her eyes burned with exhaustion, but she could never close them, because she was scared of what she wouldn't see as well as what she would see. "It was so simple." She had looked into their black, lifeless eyes after they'd died.

In her hands were both of the dragon radars. Her arms were slumped to the ground such that someone small or crawling could come along and pluck one of the radars out of one of her loose-gripping hands. She just wanted to make breathing feel good again. She couldn't remember the last thing she ate, and she wondered briefly if she even had in the last few days. The world around her was colorless and bland in focus. Then, she heard snoring, and at first she thought it was a stranger, but when she jolted and turned to see if someone was around the tree, it became clear that the snoring was hers. She had fallen asleep with her eyes open, and with tears gathering in her eyes realized that's what she would be doing for the rest of her life.

She sniffed for a few moments, then felt a light tug in both of her wrists as the two dragon radars slipped from her hands. Seina jolted and turned to see who had taken them. It was Matt, staring at her like some kind of disappointed father.

"What are you doing?" Matt asked. "Did you get the dragon balls back from where they were hidden."

Seina stared vacantly at him. Her mouth was drooped.

"I'll take that as 'no,'" Matt sighed. "Let's go get them, then. Apparently I have to do everything myself these days. It's fine. We can be out of here when the sun goes down and-"

"Why was it so simple?"

"What?" Matt shrugged. "Don't know what you mean."

"Why was… it… so simple?"

Matt's head tilted. "Why was… what… so simple?"

"Why?"

Matt gazed at her expectantly, and decided to speak only when it was obvious Seina was done. "Because, it was them, or we were going to be separated and put in jail along with about 10,000 other animals who just spend all their time confined in terrible stone cubicles. You fucked everything up—everything, Seina, and I did what I had to do to save it. I didn't enjoy it. I didn't want it. But I did it, and I don't feel bad about it. Now let's go."

Matt pulled Seina's hand, but her feet remained firmly on the ground she was standing on. Matt looked back at her fiercely. "Last warning, Seina. We're. Going. Now."

Seina's tears started anew. "It shouldn't have been that easy."

"You keep saying that, Seina, but I don't know what you mean," Matt said, trying to calm himself. "You need to explain—"

"They just died! We killed them, and left them there, and now they're gone and we're…" Seina had to catch her breath. Matt started looking around, trying to make sure no one was listening. The park was deathly empty. "We're still here! It only took a few seconds, and they were just gone, and we're still here! Something's wrong with that, isn't there?!"

"No," Matt said. "It is what it is."

Seina sunk to her knees, the weight of what she and her partner had done becoming more literal by the second. "It's—for the rest of our lives, it'll be like this, they're gone and we're still here, and it shouldn't have been _THAT FUCKING EASY!"_

Seina, crying violently, stood and beat her fists against Matt as he drew in closer. He pulled her to himself until there was no room for her to draw her arms back to hit him, and when that happened, she screamed into the shoulder of a man she'd grown to hate, and Matt tried not to cry into the shoulder of a woman he was still in love with.

 **TBC**


End file.
